Unlike today’s Hollywood, where jobs represented on-screen are mostly superhero assassin (Marvel or DC), architect or web designer with the apartment of a tech mogul (romantic comedy), or high-powered executive giving it all up to start a scrappy small-town bakery (Hallmark), 1970s films often found drama and meaning in everyday workplace scenarios that audiences could recognize: Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek bonding and competing as health spa workers in Robert Altman’s 3 Women, or Dustin Hoffman working dead-end jobs while flirting with returning to crime as a paroled convict in Straight Time, or, of course, Sally Field toiling in a textile plant while discovering herself and her power as a union organizer in Norma Rae.

Far fewer people remember Blue Collar, the 1978 film about Detroit autoworkers trying to get ahead without losing their souls. The directorial debut of Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader, it features major stars — Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto, and a nervy, incandescent Richard Pryor, in what Pryor biographers David and Joe Henry call “his finest film performance.”

Blue Collar received strong reviews upon release. Yet today it is rarely counted among the essential films of its time. As one Letterboxd reviewer put it this month: “This movie rips so hard. Why isn’t this on every single list of great films from the 70s?”