The Michigan Daily-Friday, May 12, 1978-Page 9
Hollywood tackles American workers
By OWEN GLEIBERMAN
As far as politics are concerned, American movies generally follow an all too
familiar pattern. There are, in the best of traditions, the bad guys,
like the McCarthy henchmen in The Front, and there are the masses
of saintly innocents who get trampled on in the process of the bigwig's
corrupt gamesmanship. If movies like The Front have their cynical side,
it is equally true ghat they may appear "redeeming' by viewing corruption as
essentially an aberation-a betrayal of good old American justice. These movies,
along with European offerings like The Conformist, ask how the seeds of corrup-
tion ever worked themselves into a system founded on moral roots. And it is here
that Blue Collar, a tale of the harsh, drab lives of three Detroit auto workers, takes
a step ina wholly different direction.
The film is uncompromisingly fatalistic, and doesn't concern itself with how the
system became corrupt; it accepts that as a premise, then systematically demon-
strated how the corruption and utter disregard for humanity within the auto in-
dustry is a choking, poisonous haze in the lives of the workers-a permanent
malaise one can't escape. Directed and co-scripted by Paul Schrader, who wrote
the screenplay for Taxi Driver, Blue Collar's atmosphere is so oppressive, its
outlook so menacingly grim, that it seems to lie in a realm beyond the cry of
protest. It is more a desperate howl of agony that occurs during the final stages
of defeat.
This is Schrader's debut as a
director, and he has accomplished \'tx1
an effective, if obvious, merging of
form and content. Most of the scenes
are crudely, harshly lit, and carry,
the aura of having been hacked out
with a sledgehammer. From the
opening sequence, in which the camera slowly glides past a row of workers in the
bluish-grey light of an auto factory to the ponderous accompaniment of "Hard
Workin' Man," there's hardly a breath of fresh air. Virtually all the action takes
place indoors-within the relentless droning of the auto plants or in seedy bars-and
the sky, when it does show through, is polluted and omnipresent, just one more
element in the workers' stifling inferno.
The story concerns three workers, Zeke (Richard Pryor), Smokey (Yaphet Kot-
to), and Jerry (Harvey Keitel), bound by their common situation as victims in a
system they're chained to for survival. Two suddenly find themselves in financial
peril: Zeke owes several thousand dollars in back taxes, and Jerry's daughter in so
intent on receiving orthidonture work that she takes to cutting her gums with
homemade braces.
Along with Smokey, they decide to rob their local union office, but going through
with the plan discover that the storehouse holds a mere 600 dollars. During the
robbery, however, they uncover a record of transactions between union officials
and loan sharks; convinced they have the upper hand, they try to blackmail the of-
ficials, only to learn that it can't be done, that The System will use whatever tools
are necessary (ever murder) to preserve its dictatorial power.
THE THEME, or as presented in Blue Collar, the lesson, is that nobody is on the
workers' side, that they're doomed before they begin. The film is anti-
management and anti-union; the workers' interactions with higher-ups, whether it
is company officials or at their weekly union meetings, are games, hopeless syn-
dromes of going through the motions that constitute a shallow pretense of giving
anyone a fair shake.
This message is ubiquitous. Schrader is so intent upon getting his point across
that virtually every situation is subservient to the message it carries. The result is
that Blue Collar is bereft of dramatic eloquence. Most of the scenes serve their
purpose then cease to function within the emotional texture of the film, as if
Schrader had forgotten they ever existed.
A good example is the small glimpse we get of a party-one of the few instances
when Zeke, Smokey, and Jerry seem relatively released from their daily worries
and frustrations. Yet instead of maintaining the more relaxed elements of his
characters throughout the film, Schrader-who might have directed from a
schematic diagram-dispenses with the idea entirely once he thinks it has served
its purpose.
THE FILM'S construction is so lacking in human dimensions that it might have
been a devastating failure were it not for the performances. As it is, Pryor, Kotto
and Keitel each lend great intensity and cntrol to their roles, and the believability
of their frustrations is almost solely responsible for the passion and dignity Blue
Collar's message carries with it. Pryor gets a fair share of comic lines, and his
initial monologue delivered at a union meeting might have been lifted from one of
his routines. But Pryor The Comedian is soon forgotten, for his anger glistens with
such intensity that one feels anything can happen when he takes the screen.
Keitel is not as exciting to watch as is the case with his more volatile performan-
ces in Scorsese's films (this is due in large measure to the fuzziness of the role),
but he radiates an earnest simplicity that is convincing and energetic. Kotto, gives
perhaps the most affecting performance..His Smokey is an ex-con who has accep-
By CHRISTOPHER POTTER
How is one to react to the slightly mendacious F.I.S.T. phenomenon ni~w
sweeping the country, opening in little old Ann Arbor the very same day it opened
in New York in a rapacious display of gobus equality? It would have been difficult
under the most inspired of circumstances for me to react favorably toward a
motion picture so saturated with a barrage of pre-release hucksterism which
seemed multitudinous even in this age of hype.
Item: The elongated, seldom asked-for protestations by the film's creators
that their work was most certainly not patterned after the life and death of Jimmy
Hoffa. Item: The condescending human-interest dispatches detailing the common-
man virtues of the good burghers of Dubuque, Iowa, where much of F.I.S.T. was
filmed. Item: The great debate by the aforementioned creators over which of three
separate endings should climax their story (apparently an aesthetic compromise
was reached, as tidbits from all three seem to have finally been spliced together).
Super-hot Item: The triumphant, orgasmically-awaited return to the screen of
Sylvester ("Rocky's back!!") Stallone, whose concept of self might make even
Jerry Lewis seem retiring by comparison.
HAVING SUFFERED through such infuriatingly self-congratulatory excesses
of F.I.S.T.'s promo campaign, I probably would have faced a concerted critic's di-
lemma had the film itself proved to be some brilliant, incisive portrait of working-
class Americana. It turns out I needn't I
have worried - F.I.S.T.'s thematic
concepts are as small-minded as its
dubious publicity, its artistic creden-
tials devotedly grade-B in both in-
spiration and execution.
Mock denials to the contrary, F.I.S.T.
was obviously tailored to parallel James Hoffa's career in spirit if not in intimate
detail. The film traces the life of Johnny Kovak (Stallone), a young laborer in
Depression-era Cleveland who yearns for a better life. Fired from a long-hours-
little-pay job, he joins up as a local organizer for the Federation of Inter-State
Truckers (F.I.S.T. - clever?). Johnny's natural leadership charisma soon shines
through, and before long he is leading his fellow workers in a violence-torn strike
against a Cleveland trucking company.
The fledgling local seems doomed to failure in combatting the seasoned, brutal
company men, so Johnny takes what proves a fatal end-justifies-the-means step:
He enlists Mafia aid in a violence-for-violence counterattack. The tactic succeeds,
a union contract is signed, and both F.I.S.T. and Kovak are assured of ever-
increasing fame and fortune. Yet he has draped himself and his union with an
albatross he cannot cast off - once the Mob has its fingers in the pie, it will never
let go.
THE FILM follows Johnny's ascending fortunes through the 40's into the 50's,
as he eventually rises to the national presidency of F.I.S.T. - now some three
million members strong. He strides atop the labor world, but alas, his checkered
past is soon to catch up with him. Stalked by a racket-busting senator (Rod
Steiger), Johnny is brought to heel at a crime hearing in Washington, then is
shotgunned to death by his Mafia creditors, now convinced he has outlived his
usefulness. Through triumph and tragedy, the film takes pains to emphasize that
Johnny never took a dime for personal gain, that his criminal underdealings
stemmed from the noblest of save-the-union motives, that he was a kind of tragic
prince destroyed by forces ultimately out of his control. The theory doesn't wash
for a second. If there was one word to best describe F.I.S.T., it would be "shod-
dy." For all the millions poured into it, the film resides on the level of a made-for-
TV movie, complete with flat, straw-man characterizations and an overriding
stage-set cheapness which continually renders its legitimately fascinating subject
moribund. The early sequences depicting Johnny's days in Cleveland are so
stiflingly cliched that any seasoned TV watcher could predict everything that hap-
pens at least half an hour before it occurs.
See youthful Johnny initially assert himself, throwing a crate of fish at the feet
of an evil foreman; see Johnny light up his downtrodden co-workers with in-
spiration as he makes his first union hall speech; see Johnny get beaten up by
company thugs, then watch him righteously boot a slimy company lawyer out of
his office after the latter attempts to buy him off; see Johnny ethnically woo his
young wife-to-be, despite the razzings of a group of neighbors perched comic
opera-like on some nearby tenement steps; see Depression-period Cleveland
(looking for all the world like Dubuque, Iowa), over-bathed by cinematographer
Lazlo Kovacs in the golden glow of self-conratulatory nostalgia. When the film
eventually moves out of its fabricated 30's toward present times, it mercifully
sheds much of its ersatz visual stereotypes, then just settles down into honest but
unrelenting torpidity.
A GOOD DEAL of the blame for the prevailing tedium must fall of course upon
director Norman Jewison, in the Hollywood vernacular a "workmanlike" film-
maker - which translated means an artist dreadfully lacking in both imagination
and sense of rhythm. Yet what are we to make of the stale screenplay by Stallone
and co-writer Joe Eszterhas?
Reports have it that Stallone refused to play a character of less than superhero
dimensions, and that the personality of Kovak was simplified to meet the star's
cartoon specifications. What a botched opportunity! There is hardly an aspect of
20th Century America more neglected or more deserving of cinematic study than
growth of organized labor. What really gave it its prime impetus? Why did it
slowly evolve into a limited worker goods-oriented lobby instead of into the vibrant
political force it might have become?
What tortuous inner conflicts would drive a Jimmy Hoffa, would juxtapose his
apparent passionate commitment to his union members with his perfect
willingness to deal in any number of unscrupulous endeavors? F.IS.T. doesn't
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