Critics reviews

It offers up the bitter, outrageous, and ultimately despairing vision of anti-union efforts that the subject deserves. It's a movie about how power maintains itself through the manipulation and the devastation of the powerless. It's no wonder it remains one of our most searing visions of class and labor in the history of American movies. And it's no wonder Hollywood never tried to make it again.

I don't much care for Paul Schrader's films, but goddamn if BLUE COLLAR, his 1978 directorial debut, isn't a bona fide masterpiece. It's not just subversive, but radical—a true indictment of a capitalist system that divides to conquer.

A deterministic pamphlet ("jukebox Marxism," says Pauline Kael), a dark-tinged prole caper, a crimson tableau of impotent wrath -- and, as always with the filmmaker, the eye of the aesthete who longs to be a roughneck.

Unlike Schrader's other movies, Blue Collar displays a remarkable specificity... The moral crises of Blue Collar are no less dire than in Schrader's more religiously themed work, but here they spring from a fully observed environment. As a result, the movie is affecting as a social portrait as well as a psychological drama.