[In Blue Collar, one feels that Paul Schrader] has a distinctive imagination and eye without as yet a sure directorial instinct. The discordant elements in the film—comedy, melodrama, social message—are imperfectly fused. But Blue Collar's vitality and drive generally prevail over technical flaws. It is continuously fresh, surprising, and absorbing….

Blue Collar, for all its documentary verve, does have two grievous faults. There is a grave disjunction in its internal logic. The key message, uttered mid-film by the wise ex-con and repeated behind a freeze finish, is straight out of the Thirties: The company's purpose, as the old black warns his comrades, is to preserve its power by setting the workers at one another's throats. The particular idea, Paul Schrader subsequently told an interviewer, was to show "how racism is used as a device by the corporate structure to keep the men divided and their...