Turn it off? Are you kiddin' baby? Took me three years to pay for that muthafucka. We gonna watch everything they show on it. All the shit they show. Even the snow when the muthafucka go off, I'm gonna sit here and watch that.

Schrader's rarely screened directorial debut thrust him to the front ranks of the New Hollywood as one of the most politically astute and precocious of the young Turks who seized the studio reins. Centered on a trio of frustrated auto factory workers who rob their union office in an act of desperate rebellion, Blue Collar is structured on the type of genre-derived narrative—here, that of the caper film—that recurs throughout Schrader's films. Blue Collar is, however, far more interested in place than in its cops-and-robbers story, focusing on the rich details of a working-class community and the type of alienation that unites its inhabitants in a constant and ultimately futile struggle. – A.S. Hamrah