Where everybody knows your name.
Blue Collar (1978) and Mikey and Nicky (1976). This essay contains mild spoilers for both films.
There’s a bar out there with all it’s lights on. It’s got a pool table and a pockmarked dartboard. It sells cigarettes and bags of chips. Faded pictures on the wall of someone who was important when they visited decades ago. Where you can get a Hamms for two dollars and maybe a ham sandwich for a few dollars more. In the early months of the pandemic, there was no place in the world that I wanted to go back to more than this bar.1 For me, this was a place of normalcy. For the leads of Mikey and Nicky and Blue Collar, it’s a place where they can step out of the shadows (self-imposed or otherwise) and into the light.2
In Blue Collar, Paul Schrader’s 1978 directorial debut, this place is Little Jo’s Bar. A Detroit dive for the union men working at the Checker’s automotive factory. Bartowski, Zeke, and Smokey (Harvey Keitel, Richard Pryor, and Yaphet Kotto respectively) come here after a long day toiling beneath the plant’s titanic machinery to blow off some steam of their own. They’ll do anything to avoid returning home to the realities of their money trouble. Zeke owes the IRS $2460.75, an amount that may as well be a death sentence based on the fear in his eyes. Bartowski needs money to get his daughter braces3 after she mangles her gums with homemade wire. And Smokey, owner of the coolest house in the world, owes a loan shark after some bad gambling moves.
They’re proud union men, who’re getting fucked six ways to Sunday by their own union. At the first meeting, the union brass has the balls to ask the agitated crowd to volunteer extra hours handing out pamphlets, when moments later they balk at Zeke’s request to get his locker fixed after two years of complaints. When Zeke files a complaint with their brutish union leader Eddie Knuckles, he fakes a phone call to avoid the conversation.4 It’s no wonder then that our three heroes decide to rip off the same union that’s ripping them, by robbing a safe inside union headquarters.
Hot off of the script from Taxi Driver two years earlier, Schrader aims his disaffected venom at the power structures that keep workers in their place. Namely, the organizations that are supposed to be their protectors. The union, presenting as simply out of touch, is a wolf in sheep's clothing. The union is openly being investigated by the FBI for corruption, and is willing to commit much more brutal crimes than that after the trio’s botched robbery attempt. The union sends goons to Bartowski’s home to rough up his wife. It covers up a murder at the plant as “negligent safety protocols.” And it offers Zeke a promotion solely to get him on their side. When Bartowski tries to get Zeke to take vengeance against the union, Zeke shakes his head. “You’re my friend Jerry, but you’re thinking White.”
Race is the end all be all of this film, even the casting immediately brings this to the forefront. How often does a movie have two Black leads and one White? Racism is thrown around casually by the factory management. As foreman Dogshit Miller berates his workers with cotton picking jokes, Zeke’s line that the plant is just short for plantation seems right on the money. This vileness from the union is all the more interesting given the modern progressive place that unions hold in the culture. It’s shocking to hear the union chief shake down Zeke late in the film, as Eddie Knuckles spits, “Blacks got jobs because guys like me knew when to stand up, and when to look the other way.” However, the union knows that race is the little man’s weapon too. The trio of stalwart friends aren’t unaware of the different situations they’ve been born into. Yet, with a little pressure from the union brass, these differences shatter them apart. When Bartowski tries to get Zeke to flip for the FBI, Zeke knows that the police won’t protect him. Bartowski may get another chance by flipping, but working within union management is the only chance Zeke has to make it as a Black man. So when the final, slur-laden fistfight ends their friendship, it’s all the more heartbreaking to wonder if these prejudices would have reared up on their own. As Smokey says in an echoed line, “They pit the lifers against the new boy and the young against the old. The Black against the White. Everything they do is to keep us in our place.”
In Elaine May’s 1976 gangster drama Mikey and Nicky, the bar is BNO Tavern. Lovelorn patrons lean on the bar while buzzed couples sway to the country music. One such couple sits at a plastic table, eating cheese crackers and sipping on bottles of Schmidt's. Distressingly, they’ve each paired this with a glass of milk. The sickly Nicky (independent film maverick John Cassavetes) and anxious Mikey (Columbo himself, Peter Falk) are low level gangsters in crumpled suits, sweating it out over milk and beers. A hit has been put out on Nicky after he stole money from the boss, and his best friend Mikey has come to his rescue just as he always does. Yet, within the first twenty minutes, Mikey takes a call with the hitman to give him directions to BNO and his mark.
Mikey and Nicky is a single night odyssey through the Hell that is male friendship. That’s not a reductive insult, but a remark at the complexity of it. In the opening scene, Mikey has come to Nicky’s hideout hotel room, where his best friend has worked himself into a paranoid ulcer. Mikey’s brought his own antacid tablets, something he knows to just carry around in case his friend feels sick, and force feeds it to him like a stubborn child. Twenty minutes later, Mikey is telling the hitman to hurry up.5 Is this kindness all an act just to backstab his friend? Mikey would have you think so, often referring to his marked friend as something lower than dirt, but Falk and Cassavetes don’t give us anything that easy.
Both low-level wise guys, Mikey and Nicky carry themselves in strange limbo. Within the general population, they’re giants among ants. Mikey can easily strangle a barista over a few cartons of cream, and Nicky enters a predominantly Black bar with shark eyes - just waiting for an excuse. Their own relationship is clearly a reactive one: Nicky is damage and Mikey is damage control. It’d be simple to sympathize with Mikey as his belligerent friend runs rampant, but May doesn’t let us have a hero here. Mikey is a petty bastard, and although he may have power among the little people, he’s willing to do anything to get some attention from the higher up guys. Attention that Nicky has always had. Mikey’s father loved Nicky. The boss loved Nicky (you know, before he didn’t). Even the women love Nicky. In one of the hardest to watch scenes, Nicky forces his girlfriend to have sex in the living room while Mikey watches on from the kitchen. After he’s finished, Nicky tries to convince Mikey to try his luck. One slap in the face later and Mikey has sentenced Nicky to death.
Heavily improvised,6 their night is spent stumbling through the damp streets, cyclically arguing with each other like some two-bit ouroboros. By the end of production, the film reel was 1.4 million feet in length, three times the amount for Gone With the Wind. The fact that this lengthy bickering feels repetitive is a feature, not a bug. Over thirty years of friendship they’ve probably had countless nights like this, hashing out old grievances, sheathing and unsheathing the knife. It’s violent and caring and every hateful thing in between. But thirty years is a long time, and after Nicky breaks a precious pocket watch of Mikey’s, the weight has become too much. “I just don’t want to do it anymore,” Mikey exhales. “Do what?” “Be your friend anymore.” It’s a final twist of the knife that a beautiful, unending thing was broken by something so small.
Blue Collar is available to rent on Amazon Prime or iTunes.
Mikey and Nicky is available to stream on the Criterion Channel.
Special thanks to Austin Smoldt-Sáenz, Elena Bruess and Max Seifert.
The origins of this entire project probably stem from this desire.
Both troubled productions, perhaps the directors needed a break from it all as well. Elaine May famously hid the film rolls in a garage to protect it from the studio, while Paul Schrader suffered a mental breakdown on set as his three alpha male lead actors fought for more screen time.
A poster of a Mars rover plasters his office wall, reinforcing how disconnected he is from the little troubles of the workers.
The wonderful Ned Beatty, who spends most of the movie asking for directions and complaining to Mikey about parking.
One of my favorite stories from this entire project: during a take when Falk and Cassavetes walked out of a room, the cameras were left rolling for a few minutes. Finally, a crewmember yelled cut, much to May’s ire. When the crewmember stated that the actors had left the scene, May said “Yes, but they may come back.”