| Ed Dykhuizen |

Blue Collar plays in glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, February 7th, through Sunday, February 9th, in conjunction with the Cult Film Collective. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
Traditionally, if you’re a character in a Hollywood movie, you have to be rich. You don’t always have to be obscenely wealthy, but you must have enough money to never worry about how you’re going to pay for whatever the plot demands you have. Even if you’re in Los Angeles, where even modest homes cost a million dollars, you live in a gorgeous suburban estate.
If you’re not rich at the beginning of the movie, then the plot is probably about how you become rich. The working-class community you grew up in is either hellish or just beneath you. Sometimes older comedies might keep characters among ordinary people, but dramas only would if they were tragedies.
It all ties into the American Dream, which promises that everyone who works hard enough will become a millionaire. It’s a wonderfully optimistic vision that has motivated a lot of people to do amazing things. But there can be a dark side. When you work hard and don’t become a millionaire, you tend to assume you’ve been wronged somehow. That conclusion is often easier to accept than “bad luck” or “I’m just not good enough” or “maybe this American Dream thing doesn’t apply to me.”
During the Great Depression, the American Dream turned quite nightmarish. A lot of people who had worked very hard lost their jobs and their homes. But when you went to the movie theater, all that sad stuff was swept under the rug. Most movies were about rich people gadding about: solving crimes like in The Thin Man, falling in love like in Holiday, etc.
A few films like I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang dared to show some hard truths about 1930s America. The very concept of using movies for something besides well-earned escapism was controversial. The Preston Sturges comedy Sullivan’s Travels lampooned the mini-trend of serious Depression dramas, insisting that what a chain gang really wants to see are silly cartoons. That’s not necessarily untrue, but Sturges’s need to hinge his comedy on this point demonstrates how many people didn’t think movies should critique American society.
This bias against portraying the struggles of the working class didn’t change much for decades in the United States. Film noir would show people struggling to get by, but it was usually centered on criminals, not ordinary working folk. And its characters were often trying for a big score—a criminal’s version of the American Dream. In other countries, people embraced stories of ordinary people trying to survive: Italian Neorealism in the 1940s, British kitchen sink realism in the 1950s and 1960s, etc. In the States, it wasn’t until directors took over the industry in the New Hollywood era (1966-1979) that genuine working-class stories could become major releases.

Blue Collar is a prime representative of the rare time with plenty of films about ordinary people fighting to make ends meet. Harvey Keitel and Richard Pryor play auto workers who can’t support their families despite working full-time union jobs. A particularly heart-rending scene involves Keitel’s character’s inability to pay for his daughter’s orthodontic work. This minor plot point brilliantly taps into the painful worries that non-wealthy parents feel every day. Simply providing for the protagonists’ families is enough character motivation. You don’t need them to also aspire to become high rollers.
The protagonists of Blue Collar are not saintly victims of society either. Their solution to their money troubles is to attempt a robbery, which they do shambolically. These aren’t the Ocean’s Eleven guys pulling off a heist because they’ve chosen to be cool, impeccably dressed outlaws. These are real-life, flawed characters whose dumb decisions are all the more impactful because they’re already operating on a razor’s edge. Their relative poverty both provides motivation for the action and adds to the dramatic tension.
Blue Collar might remain within the working class throughout its run time, but it’s not about championing the pleasures of remaining an ordinary person. The ending shows how corrupt higher-ups can divide and conquer the little guys who make too much noise. It’s a brutal tragedy about how tenuous life can be if you’re not wealthy.
The settings of Blue Collar immerse us in an authentically working-class world. The film was shot in musty areas around Detroit, not well-scrubbed Hollywood sound stages. A lot of the action occurs in a real-life auto plant in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The characters spend their off hours in a genuine dive bar—not an urban hipster’s version of a dive bar, but the kind of place where no one has ever given a second thought about decoration beyond signs and posters advertising brands of beer. Your drink options are shots of whiskey and maybe two varieties of flavorless beer.

There is a lot more to Blue Collar than class issues; it is also particularly incisive about racial politics. Richard Pryor gives a speech that should be required viewing in both American Studies and acting classes.
Blue Collar was released in 1978, as the New Hollywood era was being pushed aside in favor of more upbeat spectacles like Star Wars. Thus, it doesn’t get as much attention as New Hollywood classics like Taxi Driver and Chinatown.
After two big war movies in 1979, The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now, New Hollywood was dead. In 1980, Ronald Reagan became president and working people endured a rough decade of plant closings and wealth rising upwards. As in the 1930s, the movies didn’t reflect this reality, focusing instead on suburban families and escapist adventures.
Many of those 1980s movies are wonderfully fun. But it would take until Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary Roger and Me for film audiences to be confronted with the realities of Reagan-era America. We are still struggling with massive wealth inequality. Here’s to hoping that more movies dramatize that reality with as much power as Blue Collar does.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon