Australian Left Review
Article Title
Film Review: Blue Collar
Abstract
Blue Collar is nothing less than a stunning American film, full of drama, intrigue, action, comic dialogue, even sex. Yet this movie, shown at the recent Sydney Film Festival, has failed to attract a commercial distributor in Australia. The reason: its unorthodox theme. It is not about the winning of the West, the conquest of space, or conventional cops and robbers; instead, it concerns, believe it or not, the everyday life of three Detroit auto workers and their struggles — in a violent and alienating society — against management brutality and manipulation, union bureaucracy, cynicism and corruption, and sheer poverty and hopelessness. To my mind, no contemporary film has attempted so much so tellingly.
This paper has been withdrawn.