Blue Collar

Blue Collar (1978) is Paul Schrader's directorial debut — a crime drama you can watch online on iFILM. Three Detroit auto workers — Zeke, Jerry and Smokey, played by Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto — share the same fate: low wages, mounting debts and a union that collects dues but never fights for them.

The three men cook up a plan to rob the union's safe. The take is almost nothing. But what they find inside the safe is worse: financial records that suddenly make all three of them a liability to powerful people who know how to handle problems quietly.

Schrader wrote the script with his brother Leonard and built it as a factory-floor noir where the assembly line is the system itself. The film's real subject is how institutions — unions, corporations, the state — pit working men against each other rather than against the bosses. Watch Blue Collar (1978) online on iFILM.