Klute (1971)

Alan J. Pakula’s Klute is a tense crime thriller but there’s a bit more than that going on in this movie.

Jane Fonda picked up the Best Actress Oscar for this film, a rare instance of the Academy getting it right and rewarding a truly deserving performance. It’s by far her career-best performance.

A man has disappeared. He was a small-town guy who apparently took for New York. He hasn’t been heard of for six months. There are indications that he had a secret life. A letter is found which appears to be an obscene letter addressed to a prostitute. The F.B.I. investigation has made almost no progress at all. The only lead they found was a connection with a New York City call girl whom he was harassing.

The call girl is Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda). She was able to give the police very little information but she was quite badly frightened, and she’s still nervous. She is convinced someone is watching her. It’s not much of a lead but it’s all Klute has.

Klute is John Klute (Donald Sutherland) and he’s from the same small town as the missing man. The missing man was a close friend. Klute is not a detective and has no experience in missing persons work but he is hired to pursue the investigation when it becomes obvious the F.B.I. is fresh out of ideas. From the uniform he’s wearing in a very early scene he appears to be a sheriff’s deputy but we het the impression he’s quit in order to work this case as a private detective. Klute’s only real qualification for the job is that he cares.

Klute tries to pump Bree for information. She’s suspicious and hostile and at the same time she’s scared and maybe Klute is the only person who can protect her. More to the point, he’s the only person actually willing to do so.

Two years earlier Bree was beaten up by a john. Finding that man seems likely to be the key to the case. To find him they’ll have to find the prostitute who set Bree up with that john. Klute keeps hitting dead ends.

Bree is pretty confused. She wants to push Klute away and at the same time she’s afraid that if she does she’ll be alone. They start sleeping together and Bree gets a shock. For the first time in her life she actually enjoys having sex with a man.

Bree and Klute (unlikely partners in detection) make little progress and there are worrying indications that the situation could be much more dangerous than they’d thought. Klute not only has to crack the case, he has to keep Bree alive.

There’s no real mystery in this film. The viewer knows the solution to the puzzle right from the start, and might be surprised that Klute can’t see it.

The lack of mystery is no problem. This is a suspense film and so it’s important that the audience should know the answers before the protagonists do. And it’s an effective suspense film.

It’s also (not surprisingly for a film directed by Alan J. Pakuka) a 70s paranoia movie. And it’s very much a movie about voyeurism. Klute has has Bree under surveillance and he’s taped her phone calls. Someone else is taping her calls as well. Bree’s idea that she is being watched isn’t just paranoia. Klute has watched Bree with johns, and there’s someone else doing that as well.

Klute is also a weird kind of love story. Bree didn’t think she needed love but she finds that maybe she was wrong. Klute had no intention of getting involved with Bree, but he is involved. They’re so mis-matched that the chances of anything working out between them seem slim, but stranger things have happened.

Of course it’s also a movie about a prostitute. Mercifully it doesn’t get political or moralistic about this. Bree herself has mixed feelings about being a prostitute. She’s not sure that it’s a heathy longterm lifestyle and she talks about wanting to get out of the business but at the same time she admits that she enjoys being a call girl. This is a movie that trusts us to make up our own minds. There are certainly no moral judgments being made on Bree for being a hooker. Interestingly enough it doesn’t really make moral judgments on the men who employ the services of prostitutes - early on we see her with a john and he’s a regular guy and seems pretty nice.

It’s also a movie about control, and about sex as a means of control, but this is treated in a complex way as well. Bree uses sex as a means of control, but mostly she uses sex as a way of feeling in control of her own life.

Fonda is excellent in a difficult rôle. Bree is prickly and hostile and very hard to like. She is certainly not a whore with a heart of gold.

I’m not sure about the scenes between Bree and her therapist. I guess they serve the same purpose as a voiceover narration but in a less clumsy way. It’s a means of allowing us to hear Bree’s internal monologues so it works up to a point.

Donald Sutherland brings a subtlety and sensitivity to his performance that I’ve never seen from him in any other movie. Klute is an odd character. He’s very much a small-town guy with old-fashioned ideas about personal responsibility but at the same time he accepts Bree with all her faults and her prickly personality and he accepts her as a prostitute.

At a stretch Klute could almost be considered a neo-noir, in mood and look at least. Bree has some femme fatale characteristics. She certainly tries to play the femme fatale with Klute. She is however much too vulnerable to be a real femme fatale.

Mention must be made of the superb and disturbing music.

The Criterion DVD looks good. This is a movie that is intended to convey a rundown grimy gritty look to the city and to Bree’s apartment and the cinematography reflects this. There are quite a few extras. The featurette on the fashions seen in the movie is the most worthwhile.

Klute is regarded as being part of Pakula’s “paranoia trilogy” along with The Parallax View (which I’ve seen and liked) and All the President’s Men (which I’ve never seen). There are some similarities to the Parallax View but even more significant differences. Klute studiously avoids taking any overt political stance and I really don’t see any covert political subtext either. Klute is concerned with the psychological and the emotional rather than with the political. Klute is about people, not ideologies.

What makes Klute a great movie is its refusal to engage in cheap manipulation of the audience. There’s plenty of nuance here, something that is rare in Hollywood movies. One of the two truly great major studio films of the 70s (the other being Chinatown). Very highly recommended.