Scriptwriter and former film critic Paul Schrader's directing debut, a hot-under-the-blue-collar propagandrama about how the System contrives to divide and conquer the workers in the Detroit auto industry. (The manufacturers of Checker cabs, who opened their facilities to the filmmakers, are graciously absolved, in the acknowledgments, of any likeness to the factory and the union portrayed in the film.) Schrader's script is a direct descendant of the Clifford Odets-Maxwell Anderson school of the 1930s and 40s, although his cumbersome message has been translated into a raunchier, spiffier street-smart idiom, vehemently profane and prosaic. The didactic soapbox rhetoric is more than adequately offset by a good, strong thread of paranoid tension running throughout the film. Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto. (1978) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.