“I never knew how to handle money. I was always broke”. Ezekiel Brown is a blue collar worker of an assembly line in a Detroit car factory. Plagued by a shortage of money and dishonest union representatives, and in order to feed his wife and three kids, he agrees to rob the union safe with his co-workers Jerry and Smokey. However, the three only find 600$ in it, and a notebook detailing shady transactions and loans. Ezekiel decides to blackmail the union with the notebook, demanding 10,000$. When the officials find out, they offer Ezekiel a promotion into a union representative in exchange for the notebook. Smokey is killed while locked up to suffocate in a car paint room. Jerry detests Ezekiel’s “selling out” and decides to testify for the FBI.
The feature length debut film of Paul Schrader, the screenwtiter of “Taxi Driver”, “Blue Collar” is a surprisingly bitter, strong and disenchanted independent film. Schrader was probably not immune to the aura of comedian Richard Pryor (here without his trademark moustache), and thus allowed him to randomly insert a few humorous one-liners: in one sequence, an IRS official discovers that Ezekiel lied he has six kids, when he only has three. But Ezekiel’s wife “borrows” three kids from the neighbor and lines them all up for inspection. The official asks the kids what their name is, but they do not anwser, so Ezekiel says: “That’s because they don’t talk to strangers”; in another sequence, Jerry wakes up in the middle of the night and tells his wife that he ostensibly forgot to lock the door of the gas pump, but in reality meets with Ezekiel to have a night party in a house. However, overall, Pryor’s performance is serious, and much more so in the second half of the film, delivering a rare dramatic performance, with enough subtlety and nuances (the sequence where he basically explains to Jerry why he “sold himself out”). The storyline is kind of unfocused in its theme, trying to bring across some sort of a big message about the exploitation of the working class, wealth inequality and the power play of the big people in charge, yet this kind of feels chaotic and not that well thought out to the end, or it works, but only to a certain degree. Despite a slow start and not that much inspiration, “Blue Collar” is a quality social study of the ‘underdogs’ in the world, whereas Pryor is even able to perform on pair with the veteran actor Harvey Keitel.
Grade:++
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