THE UNIONS AND THE MOBS

...T. is an outdoor picture, showing how a man like Johnny Kovak rises (in Jimmy Hoffa fashion) from a warehouse man to an organizer, to a union president with uneasy ties to the mob...

...The setting is almost bucolic...

...but his protest lacks force...

...Despite their underlying pessimism, neither Blue Collar nor F.I.S.T...

...T. is that in 1978 they should have been made at all...

...The music from the soundtrack—Captain Beefheart singing "Hard Workin' Man"—is deafening at this point, but when the music stops, the noise from the plant is even worse...

...All he can do is shout at Senator Madison, "What the hell do you know about anything...

...In short order they become fugitives, and Blue Collar declines into a heist movie...

...Yet in On the Waterfront the questions of how a union is run, how it becomes tied in with the mob, how it might be changed internally, what it is like to work on the docks remain peripheral...

...Hollywood directors, even when they have had a star like Henry Fonda or Sean Connery or David Carradine at their disposal, have tended to mute their union issues and in the end replace them with some other concern...

...Through a police informant, the union learns who has robbed it and immediately sets out to silence all three men...

...S.T., reflect this same pattern...

...The take from the robbery is only $600, and when along with the money Smokey, Jerry, and Zeke discover a record of their union's loan-sharking, they are in trouble...

...He simply tells Jerry that protection and a new identity from the FBI provide the only chance he has for survival, and Jerry, realizing he is trapped, agrees to reveal what he knows about his union's illegal loans...

...At their union hall, a dreary room decorated with posters of Martin Luther King and John Kennedy, they are in open conflict with their shop steward, who wants only to advance his own career...

...nor do they make the relationship between the mob and unions so simple that in the end we can imagine the FBI or a Senate Rackets Committee becoming the bureaucratic force that will guarantee clean unions...

...The closest we come are independent productions like Herbert Biberman's Salt of the Earth or such documentaries as Barbara Kopple's Harlan County, U.S.A...

...Yet the contrast is ironic...

...The result is a movie in which the first half seems as if it were based on a script by Harvey Swados and the second half on one by Alfred Hitchcock...

...The unions in Blue Collar and F.I.S.T...

...The FBI, which is trying to get evidence against Jerry's local, is in its way as ruthless as his union...

...It is a robbery that all three men look on as a way of "getting back," but what it leads to is their undoing...

...and instead of Karl Malden as Father Barrie, Terry's conscience, we have David Huffman as Abe Belkin, Johnny's adopted brother and conscience...

...Zeke is bought off with a promotion to shop steward, and after an attempt on his life fails, Jerry goes to the FBI for protection...

...There is a logical relationship between its two halves, and while Schrader does little to emphasize this relationship, it emerges despite Blue Collar's slickness...

...It is not until the Consolidated Trucking Company, which he is trying to organize, puts pressure on him, first by trying to hire him, then by having him beaten up, that Johnny begins to realize what he has gotten into—and even this realization is limited...

...More and more of his union's pension funds are now tied to the mob's Las Vegas casinos, and when his friend Abe (still uncorrupted) leads his West Coast local on a wildcat strike, it is Johnny who gives the order to break the strike...

...There is a dramatic thickness to both movies that makes it clear how personal and political desperateness (especially the use of the mob) can arise out of situations in which the conditions and pay for work are humiliating, and both movies close with freezeframe shots suggesting that only those who have worked under such conditions can fully comprehend this relationship...

...can, however, be dismissed as Hollywood films that raise the question of unionism only to bypass it for something else...

...He emerges as the leader of a wildcat strike only after we have seen a group of men clambering for ajob in the warehouse where he works and only after we have seen the abusive treatment they receive from their foreman...

...Madison's disdain for Johnny's past, his inability to understand his ties with the mob seem middle-class pieties in the context of the first half of F.LS.T., and by the film's end it is clear that, if the only choice is between Madison's legalistic world and Johnny's grey world, the grey world is preferable in terms of the social justice it promises...

...But his accusation does not seem misplaced...

...and the corridors of the Senate...

...It is this pattern that dominates F.I.S...

...sees that he "has a way with the men" and offers him the free use of a car (which allows him to court Anna...

...T. We are aware of the need for Johnny to act long before he is, and we see those around him— friends and enemies—realize that his ability to be a larger version of the men he works with is what makes him a leader...

...The result is Johnny's further estrangement from Abe, and when Senator Cole Madison (Rod Steiger), Chairman of the Senate Rackets Committee, asks Abe for information on F.I.S.T.'s ties with the underworld, Abe reluctantly supplies it...

...Yet we do not have in this country the Hollywood equivalent of Eisenstein's Strike or even Mario Monicelli's The Organizer...

...Federation of Interstate Truckers) only because an organizer for F.I.S.T...

...The first half of F.I.S.T...

...We see this very clearly when we compare them to the movie that more than any other might be called the archetypal crime-labor film, Elia Kazan's 1954 On the Waterfront...

...He never anticipates what happens: an attack on the strikers by company-paid thugs of the Law and Order League and collusion by the police...

...It is a reminder that they make enough to afford TVs and cars but not enough to enjoy them...

...Smokey is killed in an industrial accident the union arranges...

...At the end of On the Waterfront it is not the men in Friendly's union who start him on his way down but the Waterfront Crime Commission, and the serious drama of the film turns on whether Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) will summon up the courage to go against the code of silence he has been taught and tell the Crime Commission what he knows about Friendly...

...It also explains the action that sets off the second half of Blue Collar, their robbery of their union local's safe...

...As the camera moves down the assembly line what we see is a netherworld of auto parts, welding sparks, and shadows...

...In my mind, the government, the company, and the unions are all the same...

...Once this occurs, Johnny becomes a changed man, and at the funeral of the organizer who brought him into F.I.S.T., Johnny makes an alliance with a local mobster, Vince Doyle (Kevin Conway), who all along has insisted that what Johnny needed was "push...

...When interviewed, both directors have said as much...

...Just as the first half of Blue Collar is an indoor picture preoccupied with the psychology of being an autoworker, so the first half of F.I.S...

...FINALLY, what is perhaps most surprising of all about Blue Collar and F. LS...

...For they do much more than break with the previous ways Hollywood has dealt with labor unions...

...From the start it is not Johnny's uniqueness that we are shown so much as his larger-than-life typicality...

...What we want to know is whether there is a way of coping with this kind of routine, and the answer we get in the first half of Blue Collar is that the line dominates the lives of the men who work on it...

...We are not thrown into a world in which big is bad and unions, like all organizations, are assumed to be exclusively self-serving...

...T. ends with Johnny being brought before the Committee, and the mob choosing to protect itself, first by killing Abe, then by killing Johnny...

...The alliance is the turning point for Johnny and for F.I.S.T., and in a crowd scene that parallels the union's first clash with the Law and Order League, F.I.S.T...

...S. T. never put a gloss over what it means to work eight hours a day at brutalizing labor...

...is going to be corrupted by the mob...

...97 Blue Collar begins with the most telling portrayal of an assembly line since Modern Times...

...Its agent (Cliff de Young) makes no effort to persuade Jerry that what he is doing is right...

...Home, especially for Jerry and Zeke who have families, is not a place of refuge either...

...A confrontation between Zeke and the head of his local, "Knuckles" Johnson (Harry Bellaver), brings this home...

...then closes on a note of triumph...

...It is an argument that, given what we have seen of the union in action, is not convincing, but it does nonetheless provide us with some insight...

...They are the Captains of Industry, who rule the world," Paul Schrader recently observed, and in answer to a question about the purposes of F.I.S.T., Norman Jewison told the New York Times, "It is really about power and how power corrupts...

...The second half of F.I.S.T...

...They may lack the focused intensity of a documentary like last year's Academy Award-winning Harlan County, U.S.A., but for all their emphasis on crime and the mob, they mark a new stage in Hollywood's depiction of unions...

...We see how the union defends itself to its members, and we see how difficult it is for Zeke, who knows he is being bought off with a promotion to shop steward, to find an alternative framework to operate in...

...resists easy interpretation...

...through the depression...

...They are too rich for that...

...Johnny's alliance with the mob, his rise to president of F.I.S.T., his insistence on getting a national contract for his drivers have brought him new problems...

...The meeting between Jerry and the FBI is equally pointed...

...At this point what could be drug-store Marxism appears instead as an earned didacticism, and we are carried back to the fact that what turns Smokey, Jerry, and Zeke into the "Oreo Gang" is what could also lead to their politicalization...

...are so dependent on organized crime for their survival that often both films seem perfectly matched to the current political climate in which "sophistication" consists in assuming that all unions, like any organization from General Motors to the CIA, are corrupt and will automatically break the law to get their way...

...What we see of a union boss—Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) counting up his take and ordering his goons to do a job—is so sketchy that it seems like caricature...

...When he finally gets a strike going at Consolidated, Johnny assumes that, if the men stick together, the company will have to negotiate with them...

...The only questioning note is raised by Abe Belkin, who protests that F.I.S.T...

...This feeling of desperateness does more, however, than account for the anger Smokey, Jerry, and Zeke feel...

...In context these scenes are not enough to change the gangster-picture mood of the second half of Blue Collar, but they do keep it from being overwhelming, and they lead directly to the final scene of Blue Collar in which Zeke and Jerry, each feeling betrayed, turn on each other...

...BY COMPARISON with Blue Collar, F. L S. T. seems relentlessly determined to go the union-crime-exploitation route, and as if to emphasize this intention, it carries with it a set of characters who are strikingly reminiscent of those of On the Waterfront...

...Like Blue Collar and F.I.S.T., On the Waterfront appeared during a period of political reaction and in its portrayal of New York's longshoremen's unions capitalized on what was seen as a "real" situation...

...We see this initially with the robbery, which, while funny at times, is finally shown to be a desperate act by men whose only way of changing their lives is either to turn political or outlaw...

...By contrast Blue Collar and F.1...

...The union, like Smokey, Jerry, and Zeke, acts more than anything else on the basis of what it regards as its own political limits...

...instead of Eva Marie Saint as the poor-but-genteel girl he loves, we have Melinda Dillon as Anna Zerinkas, a poor-butproud glove-maker...

...The labor struggles that took place two decades earlier in the industrial flats of Cleveland are now centered in the national offices of F.I.S.T...

...Two recent films, Paul Schrader's Blue Collar and Norman Jewison's F.I...

...The same political logic also applies to the role the union and the FBI play in Blue Collar...

...Like the second half of Blue Collar, the second half of F.I.S.T...

...In contrast to the meeting between Zeke and "Knuckles" Johnson, which takes place on a bridge overlooking the freeway into Detroit, the meeting between Jerry and the FBI occurs on a bridge by the Detroit River...

...In scene after scene we see the frustration of three Checker Cab makers, Smokey (Yaphet Kotto), Jerry (Harvey Keitel), and Zeke (Richard Pryor) as they travel back and forth from the bar they hang out in after work, to their union hall, to their homes...

...Gone are the speeding cars and giant Goodyear clock (clicking out the minutes and auto production) from the earlier scene...

...In a period in which the suffering of the genteel protagonists of Annie Hall and An Unmarried Woman is increasingly what creates movie interest, they argue implicitly that sophistication is the capacity to transform the brutal, and at a time when "small is beautiful" is the basis for an attack on everything from welfare to architecture, they insist that it is not size so much as our distance from day-to-day experience that is undoing us...

...In his appearance before the Senate Rackets Committee, Johnny is unable to deny any of the specific charges leveled against 99 him...

...Abe is unable to show that the mob is not necessary for dealing with companies like Consolidated...

...What he claims is that this kind of compromise has enabled the union to get to a position where it could do good for blacks and other workers...

...But where Chaplin showed the mechanical taking over the human, in Schrader's opening montage there is no room for the human...

...In place of Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy, we have Sylvester Stallone as Johnny Kovak, a Cleveland warehouse worker...

...Yet the extremes of Blue Collar do not lead to its trivialization...

...with the aid of the mob routs Consolidated's goons and inflicts enough damage on the company to persuade its owners to sign a contract...

...As the picture stops in a freeze frame, we get a voice-over of Smokey repeating what he said earlier, "Everything they do, the way they pit the lifers against the new boys, the 98 old against the young, the black against the white, is meant to keep us in our place...

...Only at the bar do they seem genuinely at ease...

...Although unions—those of the auto workers and teamsters—are central to each picture, they are in the end films that rely on the mob and gangland killings for dramatic impact...

...Yet F.I.S...

...F.I.S...

...Johnny's wildcat strike gets him fired, and he becomes an organizer for F.I.S.T...

...Johnny marries Anna and acquires the "push" he needs to break any company and bring F.I.S.T...

...begins as we are taken (through a whirling pan shot) from the dancing at Johnny's wedding to Washington in 1959, and with this transition a whole new set of problems begins...

...When a welder tells his foreman that he is getting "brain cancer" from his job, it is the insight rather than the wit of the joke that is striking...

...They even put the great horror of the sixties—political killing in a perspective it has rarely had in the media, showing it as an option that to some will always be tempting when institutional structures are so shaky that they can be changed or preserved by the assassination of a few men...

...T. does not fall into the On the Waterfront pattern...

...Johnson does not deny the union's loan-sharking or its ties with the mob...