Category: Paul Schrader

BLUE COLLAR (1978)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Paul Schrader
CAST: Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto, Ed Begley Jr.
MY RATING: 6/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 96% Certified Fresh

PLOT: Three financially strapped automotive factory workers rob their own labor union, but when they get more than what they bargained for, their friendship and loyalty are tested.


There may come a day when I revisit Blue Collar and revise my current opinion.  It’s not impossible.  I’ll be a different person five or ten years from now.  I may have a different job with different bosses and co-workers, or I may be living in a different neighborhood in a different house.  All sorts of things could change that will affect my perception differently.  Until that happens, though, this is what I think:

Blue Collar, the directorial debut of eminent screenwriter Paul Schrader, author of Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), and American Gigolo (1980), is a film with a good story to tell.  Not just good – important.  This is an important story about loyalty, friendship, and duty to your family.  Richard Pryor turns in a great performance, flexing his dramatic muscles as he seldom did, unfortunately.  Schrader’s screenplay, co-written with his brother, Leonard, and using source material from Sydney A. Glass, pulls no punches regarding corruption within the powerful auto workers union.  Character motivations are crystal clear from the opening scene to the final, cynical freeze frame.

But…but…I wish this story were contained in a film that made me care about these characters while the movie itself was playing.  Intellectually, I see the value of the story.  But as a moviegoer, I was less than moved.  Schrader’s direction is competent, but the film moves from beat to beat with the energy of a sloth.

Zeke (Richard Pryor), Jerry (Harvey Keitel), and Smokey (Yaphet Kotto) are three working-class friends on the line at an automotive plant in Detroit.  Their closeness is established in a bar scene that gave me hope for the rest of the film.  It plays almost like an Altman film, with some overlapping dialogue, simple but clear direction, and conversations that give us an instant picture of who these three disparate characters are.

It’s unclear what Smokey’s financial situation is until later in the film, but Zeke has back-taxes to pay because he has declared too many dependents for the last three years, and Jerry has a teenage daughter who is so desperate for expensive braces that she tries making some herself, with exactly the kind of results you’d expect.  Their union, which is supposed to help them, is a joke as far as they’re concerned; they can’t even fix Zeke’s broken locker door.  So, after Zeke makes some observations at the union’s local office, he and his pals hatch a plan to rob the office vault.

What they find there drives the rest of the plot, so I’ll tread lightly from here on out.  But the vault robbery is a good example of where the movie is lacking for me.  The plan is simple and relatively risk-free, but I was hoping for at least SOME suspense during the robbery.  A moment occurs when they’re about to be discovered, so they don their masks…but the masks that Zeke bought aren’t masks.  They are, in no particular order, plastic vampire fangs and a funny hat, a pair of sunglasses covered by an American flag design, and a pair of googly-eye glasses – you know, the ones where the eyeballs are attached to the glasses by long springs?  This crucial moment was ruined by the utter ridiculousness of their “costumes”; it felt like a transplant from some other Richard Pryor comedy about incompetent criminals.

After that, the screenplay feeds us important chunks of information, but there is no dynamic energy to the editing or the direction or something.  It just felt…boring.  Which is a shame because, again, there is a good story here.  The union local blatantly lies about the contents of the vault after the robbery.  An FBI agent tries to get Zeke, Jerry, or Smokey to spill what they know about union corruption, but they are too loyal to turn stool pigeon.  Zeke has to make some hard choices in one of the movie’s better scenes towards the end.  Smokey displays strength when threatened by union thugs, but he pays for it later.  And Jerry just wants to do the right thing without anyone getting hurt.

But there was just zero energy to the narrative.  I never felt carried along by the tide of the story.  And without that forward momentum, every scene felt like it was just marking time before the next.  To the degree that I understood the plight of these blue-collar workers, the movie just didn’t make me care enough to feel anything about it.  I did feel empathy for Zeke, mostly due to Pryor’s powerful, angry performance, but even that empathy was turned on its ear by the time we got to the closing credits.

There is, I guess, something to be said about how the screenplay is constructed so that, at any given point, you could say that any of the three main characters are the true lead of the film.  The story is truly balanced, and I give it credit where it’s due.  I just wish the storytelling was more dynamic.  Like I said, the day may come when my opinion of this movie will change.

Today is not that day.

…tomorrow’s not looking good, either.

MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS (1985)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Paul Schrader
CAST: Ken Ogata, and a host of Japanese actors unknown to me
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 79% Fresh

PLOT: Director Paul Schrader and executive producers George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola present a fictionalized account of the life and shocking death of celebrated Japanese writer Yukio Mishima.


It’s hard for me to know where to start with this review.  I had heard of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters by reputation for years, mostly because of Roger Ebert’s rave review and also the film’s inclusion in the Criterion Collection AND in the invaluable compendium 1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die (ed. Steven Jay Schneider).  I finally got a chance to watch Mishima recently, and in my opinion, if it does not quite succeed as Entertainment, I believe it is worthy of consideration as a genuinely artistic achievement.  Mishima is an elegant rebuttal to anyone who doesn’t believe cinema can be Art.

The lives of artists are notoriously difficult to translate to film, especially when it comes to the life of a writer.  Who wants to watch two hours of an author typing, in a fit of inspiration?  Paul Schrader came up with a rather brilliant method of getting over that hurdle by breaking up Mishima’s life story into four distinct acts, with each act featuring three separate storylines that coil around each other: the last day of Mishima’s life, flashbacks to Mishima’s earlier years, and scenes from his semi-autobiographical books that parallel events from those flashbacks.

If that sounds confusing, it’s not.  Each story thread has its own easily distinguishable color scheme.  If it’s black-and-white, it’s a flashback to Mishima’s real life.  If there is muted color and a mostly hand-held camera, we’re watching the events of his last day on earth.  If the colors are brilliant and saturated, we’re watching a scene from one his books.

What sets Mishima apart are those sequences featuring scenes from his books…and right about here is where my powers of description may fail me, but I’ll try anyway.)  It would be easy to just call them dreamlike, but that’s both true and reductive.  To me, they look like a cross-between highly stylized opera and a David Lynch film.  In the first segment, based on Mishima’s Temple of the Golden Pavilion, the set was built with lavish golden walls and accented with green lily pads, while the temple itself is a detailed miniature that at one point splits down the middle.  The second segment, based on Kyoko’s House, is awash in garish pink lights and walls (production designer and Oscar winner Eiko Ishioka describes the scene as being highly informed by American “bad taste”…trust me, she means it in a good way).  The third segment is only slightly more realistic than the first two, with breakaway walls, representational jail cells, and a ritual act that is echoed in Mishima’s real life.

Each segment is not just visually cool to look at; they are also extremely theatrical.  In one scene, we watch a wall get pulled away from a character lying on the ground, and we can clearly see the tracks on which the wall is rolling.  In another scene, a conversation at a roadside noodle stand is staged – literally on a stage – with the restaurant on a turntable turning clockwise, while groups of actors walk in a circle around the restaurant counter-clockwise.  The effect is both simple and convincing, despite its obvious theatricality. (In fact, the visual aspects of the film are solely responsible for taking this movie up from a “7” to an “8.”)

Those scenes by themselves are reason enough for me to recommend the film to viewers.  I am an unabashed fan of superhero films (the GOOD ones), but it seems as if we’re living in an age where, instead of finding different ways to tell the same story (which is bad enough), filmmakers are telling different stories, but doing it all the same way.  For example, I know, intellectually, that Black Widow and Shang-Chi were made by different directors, but is there anything in either movie that bears the imprint of their respective directors?  Nothing springs immediately to mind.  However, here is Mishima, a film that is nearly 40 years old, which may not feature countless CGI battles, but which gave me more visual surprises than any two Iron Man movies combined.  I don’t mean to pick on the MCU (which I do love, full disclosure), but you see what I’m saying.  It’s refreshing to come across a truly original work of art.

The film also asks some serious philosophical questions.  Throughout his life, Mishima believed in and advocated the bushido, which literally translates as “the way of the warrior.”  He was unashamedly right-wing, advocating the restoration of the Japanese Emperor to power, as opposed to Japan’s governmental policies of democracy and globalism.  In the film, he several times mentions “Harmony of Pen and Sword,” a philosophy in which one’s writings are nothing unless they are backed up by action.  Mishima espouses this belief so fiercely that he ruthlessly follows it to its logical conclusion in the closing passages of the film.

What is director Paul Schrader trying to tell us here?  Should we consider Mishima as a hero?  He is certainly one of Japan’s most famous and celebrated writers, but he remains controversial for his right-wing views.  (If you’re wondering how right-wing he was, in 1968 he wrote a play called “My Friend Hitler,” an event omitted from the film.)  Does Schrader consider him heroic for following through on his beliefs, even when it became, shall we say, EXTREMELY inconvenient for him to do so?

That could be one interpretation, but I don’t see it that way.  I came away from Mishima with the knowledge that, once, there lived a man who lived and died by a code.  I did not agree with his beliefs, but they were defiantly his, and no one could take that away from him.  I was reminded of one of my favorite lines from A Man for All Seasons: “But what matters to me is not whether it’s true or not, but that I believe it to be true, or rather not that I believe it, but that I believe it.”

At the end of the day, while I think Mishima’s moral stance was questionable, and while Mishima itself is less entertainment and more museum piece, the experience of watching Mishima was nevertheless time well spent, especially when considering the astonishing visuals.

(Oh, crap, I’ve gotten to the end of the review and just realized I never mentioned the phenomenal score by Philip Glass, parts of which are quoted at the finale of The Truman Show…if you’re a fan of the movie, you’ll know which parts I’m talking about.)