The Hangman (1959)

The Hangman is a slightly odd but interesting 1959 Michael Curtiz-directed western starring Robert Taylor.

Taylor plays U.S. Deputy Marshal Mackenzie Bovard who finds that bringing in a wanted man presents a few problems. For starters Bovard has no idea what the fugitive, an ex-cavalryman named Butterfield, looks like. It’s also a certainty that Butterfield will have changed his name.

There is one person who could identify Butterfield. That person is Selah Jennison (Tina Louise). She’s a pretty young widow eking out a miserable existence working in a laundry. She and Butterfield had been sweethearts but he married another girl. Bovard is confident that the $500 reward will be sufficient to persuade Selah to turn Butterfield in.

Bovard is cynical, hardbitten, ruthless and unsentimental. He has no love for the human race. He believes that everyone can be bought. You just have to offer them the right price. Bovard himself is scrupulously honest. His cynical view of human nature is so extreme that it may have distorted his view of reality. As a lawman Bovard has gained such a reputation for remorseless efficiency that he has gained the nickname The Hangman.

Bovard has a lead. He believes he knows where Butterfield is. It’s a peaceful small town. Bovard soon picks out a likely suspect, a teamster named Johnny Bishop (Jack Lord). Everyone in the town is aghast at the idea that anyone could suspect the popular Johnny Bishop of being a desperate criminal involved in a stage coach robbery that ended in several murders.

The sheriff, Buck (Fess Parker), is an easy-going kind of guy and he also refuses to believe that Johnny Bishop could be a criminal.

Bovard however is convinced that he has his man and he’s convinced that Selah can identify him. His only doubt is whether Selah will go through with it.

There is some action but this is far from being a blood-drenched western. The emphasis is on the characters, not the action. Principally the emphasis is on Bovard and Selah. And there are all sorts of complex emotional undercurrents involving the four main characters.

Bovard is honest but the job has made him hard and cynical. He’s forgotten how to trust people. The job has become an obsession. He grows steadily more obsessed with a touch of paranoia thrown in. He thinks everybody in the town is conspiring against him to stop him from bringing a guilty man to justice. He’s also bitter towards Selah but in a complicated way. First he despises her for agreeing to help him find Butterfield, because it makes her like everyone else he has ever encountered - willing to betray an old friend for money. Then he gets angry at her when he thinks she won’t help him. His conflicted feelings about Selah reflect his conflicted feelings about himself. Maybe she’s right. Maybe he’s become just as bad as the bad men he hunts.

This is the kind of complicated conflicted rôle that Robert Taylor did so well in the 50s, when he shed his lightweight matinee idol image and started taking on much darker rôles. Not necessarily villains. He came to specialise in worldweary morally compromised characters and brought a great deal of depth to such parts. Taylor has never achieved quite the recognition he deserves.

I must confess that when I hear the name Tina Louise I immediately think of Gilligan’s Island. Her character here is a million miles away from movie star Ginger. In her own way Selah Jennison is just as worldweary and cynical as Bovard. She doesn’t want to be an informer but she needs the five hundred dollars. She hates herself for being tempted by the money, and Bovard despises her for betraying her ex-lover for money. In her own way she’s as conflicted as Bovard. Tina Louise does a pretty impressive job in a demanding part.

There’s no real good vs evil theme in this movie. There are just people who have landed themselves in difficult situations and they’re struggling to figure out what they should do.

This is a very low-key western. There are no spectacular action sequences, no sweeping western panoramas, no epic feel. And, unusually for 1959, it was shot in black-and-white. It feels like a B-movie in some ways but that works to its advantage. The viewer is not distracted by spectacle and has to focus on the intimate psychological dramas. With an intelligent script by Dudley Nichols and fine performances by Robert Taylor and Tina Louise it’s an intriguing movie that deserves more attention. The ending breaks many of the rules of the genre but while it won’t please everybody I thought it worked. The Hangman is highly recommended.

The Olive Films DVD release looks just fine.

Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (1947)

Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome was the last of the four RKO Dick Tracy B-movies made between 1945 and 1947.

Chester Gould’s The Dick Tracy comic strip enjoyed huge popularity in the 1930s. Inevitably Hollywood took an interest. Republic made four serials in the late 30s and early 40s with Ralph Byrd as Tracy. The four feature films from RKO followed. Morgan Conway played Dick Tracy in the first two films and Ralph Byrd returned to the rôle for the last two.

Gould wrote the comic strip from 1931 until 1977. The two-way wrist radio that later became such a recognised trademark of the strip did not put in an appearance until 1946 and therefore does not feature in either the serials or the movies.

The movie opens with a sinister figure (Boris Karloff) entering a bar. We’re not surprised to learn that he is known as Gruesome. Karloff is not wearing actual monster makeup but he is subtly made up to look slightly monstrous. He’s looking for his buddy, a piano player nicknamed Melody. Melody tells Gruesome he has a job lined up. We never doubt for a moment that it’s a criminal enterprise of some sort. Gruesome goes to meet the guy organising the job and finds himself waiting in a scientific laboratory. Rather unwisely he uncorks a test tube and has a sniff. He then goes reeling out into the street.

A beat cop, assuming he’s a drunk, picks him up but by the time he gets him back to headquarters the supposed drunk is as stiff as a board and obviously dead.

Since this is Boris Karloff and he has star billing we know he can’t be really dead, and he isn’t.

Shortly afterwards Gruesome gets up off the slab in the morgue and walks out. This certainly puzzles homicide cop Dick Tracy.

It was that chemical that Gruesome sniffed. It has the effect of causing temporary total paralysis.

That chemical will be the key to pulling off a successful bank robbery. If everyone in the bank - the staff, the security guards, the customers - is paralysed then robbing the bank will be child’s play. It gets better. Afterwards the person remembers nothing of what happened around him during the period of paralysis. That means that not only can he not interfere with the robbery, he can’t be a witness. It’s the key to the perfect crime.

Of course in practice it turns out to be not so perfect. Dick Tracy’s girlfriend Tess Trueheart (Anne Gwynne) just happens to be in the bank at the time of the robbery and she was in the telephone kiosk so she escaped the paralysing gas. So Dick Tracy has a witness. Tracy gets another break as well, due to bungling by a member of the gang.

There’s not enough evidence to make an arrest. Tracy thinks the key is to find the source of that gas. A frightened scientist may offer a clue.

Tracy has to take a big risk to crack this case but he’s used to doing things like that.

This movie has hints of both the film noir and gothic horror visual styles. Content-wise it’s a typical hardboiled crime B-movie except for the addition of the science fiction element of the paralysing gas.

Ralph Byrd is a fine Dick Tracy and looks the part. Karloff plays Gruesome as a mean hoodlum and does a splendid job. Skelton Knaggs as X-Ray (one of the gang members) adds a subtle touch of weirdness.

This is a movie based on a comic strip and it does have a bit of a comic-strip feel, which is as it should be. It manages to be hardboiled and at the same time just a trifle outlandish and exaggerated. It’s an approach that works.

I have this movie in one of those Mill Creek 50-movie public domain collections. The transfer is remarkably good.

Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome is fast-moving well-crafted entertainment with a slightly unusual feel.

I’ve also reviewed the first two movies in the series, Dick Tracy, Detective (1945) and Dick Tracy vs Cueball (1946). Both are worth seeing.

Trader Horn (1931)

MGM’s Trader Horn was the first major feature film (as distinct from documentary film) shot on location in Africa. It cost a fortune to make but was a major box-office hit. It’s a kind of jungle girl adventure film.

It was based (loosely) on the memoirs of the real Trader Horn, Alfred Aloysius Horn, a celebrated ivory trader.

In the movie the middle-aged Trader Horn (Harry Carey) is introducing the son of his late partner to the like of a trader in Africa. The young man is named Peru (Duncan Renaldo).

They encounter a famed woman missionary, Edith Trent (played by Harry Carey’s wife Olive). Edith has been searching for twenty years for her daughter Nina, carried off as an infant in a native raid. She believes she now has a fair idea where her daughter might be found. It means travelling into very dangerous country indeed. She extracts a promise from Horn - if she is killed he will continue the search for Nina.

Soon afterwards Edith is killed, and Horn is determined to keep his promise. Horn, Peru and Horn’s gun bearer Rencharo set off to find Nina.

They find Nina (played by Edwina Booth). She has been raised by an isolated tribe that has had no contact with Europeans. The tribe worship Nina as a kind of goddess. Horn, Peru and Rencharo are captured and are about to be sacrificed but Nina decides she can’t let that happen. Accompanied by Nina they make their escape in a canoe but the tribe is in hot pursuit. The second half of the movie is an extended chase through the wilds of Africa.

Nina is blonde, gorgeous and sexy and both Horn and Peru fall for her charms. So we have a classic romantic triangle setup.

The acting is a mixed bag. Harry Carey is pretty good. Edwina Booth is perfectly adequate and manages to look like a very glamorous jungle girl. Duncan Renaldo’s performance on the other hand is excruciatingly awful and irritating.

The making of the film was not without its problems. Two members of the crew were killed during the location shooting in Africa (according to one story a cameraman was eaten by a crocodile). Edwina Booth became very ill. There were problems with the sound recording and as a result some scenes had to be reshot in the studio. It was an incredibly ambitious movie. It has to be said that the location shooting is very impressive. Some additional scenes were shot in Mexico.

This was long before the age of television nature documentaries but in the 1920s and 30s documentary films shot in exotic places were hugely popular. The director of Trader Horn, W.S. Van Dyke, had actually made such films.

Trader Horn ends up being a cross between an adventure story and a travelogue. The travelogue elements slow the movie down (and at just over two hours this movie is much too long) but audiences at the time were entranced by the location shooting.

The pacing is a real problem. There’s nothing wrong with the plot, it’s a standard jungle girl story which hadn’t yet become a cliché, but there’s just not enough plot to stretch out for two hours.

Does it have any pre-code elements? Not many, but Edwina Booth’s costume is pretty revealing and would have caused problems with the Production Code after 1934.

There was another Trader Horn movie, with a totally different plot, made in 1973.

The 1931 Trader Horn has some truly spectacular visual moments and it is a jungle girl movie and I love jungle girl movies. Just don’t expect it to reflect the social attitudes of 2023. It has some entertaining moments but it’s so very slow that it’s difficult to recommend.

The transfer on the Warner Archive DVD is acceptable.

The Woman Between (1931)

The Woman Between (later retitled Madame Julie) is a 1931 RKO pre-code melodrama.

Doris Whitcomb (Miriam Seeger) is very excited because her brother Victor (Lester Vail) is coming home from Europe. He’s been away for several years, since their father’s remarriage. At the time Victor was outraged that his father had dared to remarry after the death of Victor’s mother. Doris was not overly pleased by the marriage either.

The father, John Whitcomb (O.P. Heggie), chose for his second wife a glamorous French fashion model named Julie. Julie (Lili Damita) now runs a dress shop called Madame Julie’s. It’s more than a dress shop. It is the most exclusive and expensive fashion house in New York. Julie has been away in Europe as well, on a short business trip.

There’s naturally going to be a dinner party at the Whitcomb house to celebrate Victor’s return. Doris and her friend Helen (Anita Louise) are very excited. It’s obvious that Doris hopes that romance will blossom between Victor and Helen.

Romance has however already blossomed for Victor. It was a passionate whirlwind shipboard romance with a beautiful sophisticated Frenchwoman. Victor doesn’t want that romance to end. He suspects that the lady is a married woman but he doesn’t care. He is sure she can’t possibly be in love with her husband. He will persuade her to get a divorce and they’ll be married.

What poor Victor doesn’t know is that the sexy sophisticated Frenchwoman with whom he had dallied on the ship is his stepmother Julie. He had walked out of his father’s house without waiting to meet wife number two so he had never set eyes on her before their shipboard fling.

He also doesn’t want to believe that Julie is a married woman who is perhaps no stranger to adultery.

Naturally things get a bit tense at the dinner party when Victor is introduced to his stepmother.

Things get more tense later when Doris figures out what her brother and stepmother have been up to.

Victor wants Julie to run off with him. Julie doesn’t know what to do. She loves Victor but has no desire to hurt her husband.

To make things more difficult John Whitcomb (who has no idea what is going on) has suddenly decided to quit his high-powered business career to devote himself to making Julie happy.

This is a pre-code movie so it deals with the situation in a realistic grown-up way. Julie doesn’t want to hurt either Victor or her husband but one of them is inevitably going to get hurt. Emotional entanglements are like that.

Had this movie been made in the Production Code era the situation would have been resolved very simply. Julie would pay for her wickedness by dying horribly. Victor would have to pay as well. Virtue would be triumphant. But this was made in the pre-code era, when writers and directors were free to tell stories the way they wanted to and endings were not predictable. There was no obsession with the punishment of sin. Life was treated as something that was complicated.

It should also be mentioned that this was 1931, a time when women’s fashions were remarkably glamorous, elegant and slinky. The three main female characters are gorgeously dressed which gives the movie an added touch of class.

There’s some humour here but essentially this is a grown-up romantic melodrama. The Woman Between is fine entertainment and is highly recommended.

This movie is one of five included in the excellent Kino Classic RKO Classic Romances pre-code DVD boxed set. The transfer is a good one. The set also includes The Lady Refuses (1931), Kept Husbands (1931), Millie (1931) and Sin Takes a Holiday (1930). They’re all worth seeing, making this set a must-buy for pre-code fans.

The Pirates of Capri (1949)

The Pirates of Capri is an oddity in Edgar G.Ulmer’s career as a director but then when you think about it his entire career was full of oddities. Usually extremely interesting oddities. The Pirates of Capri is a swashbuckling adventure. It’s an Italian-American co-production shot in Italy.

It is 1798 and a warship is on its way to Naples carrying a shipment of arms, the fiancée of the Count of Amalfi and a troupe of acrobats. The acrobats are actually pirates and they seize the ship. The pirates are led by the notorious masked Captain Sirocco.

Captain Sirocco (Louis Hayward) is in fact the Count of Amalfi. In his Sirocco guise he is a handsome dashing very masculine pirate. In his Count of Amalfi guise he is a fop and a fool.

Of course this is hardly an original idea. It’s the same idea behind the Zorro books and movies. And Zorro was just a riff on Baroness Orczy’s the Scarlet Pimpernel. What matters with such dual rôles is finding an actor who can be equally convincing as both fop and hero. Is Louis Hayward up to the job? The answer is a resounding yes.

The pirates are not regular pirates. They’re revolutionaries seeking to overthrow the government of the Queen of Naples. There’s an interesting split in the ranks of the revolutionaries. Sirocco is a moderate. He wants to keep the queen on her throne. He just wants to get rid of her government, and mostly he wants to get rid of the vicious sadistic chief of police, Baron Holstein (Massimo Serato). He wants to avoid a bloodbath. The extreme revolutionaries want a bloodbath and they model themselves on the French revolutionaries so they’d be quite happy to lop off the queen’s head.

There’s a romantic complication. The Count of Amalfi’s intended bride is Countess Mercedes Villalta de Lopez (Mariella Lotti). She’s not keen on marrying the foolish count of Amalfi. Although initially horrified by Sirocco she has started to lose her heart to him. He’s the kind of action hero that any girl would fall for. Of course she has no idea that the Count of Amalfi and Sirocco are the same man.

There are plenty of fairly full-blooded action scenes. There’s a cruel villain who likes to torture young women. There’s the whole fighting for freedom thing (with a few twists). And there’s a suitably heroic hero. It’s a formula that should work, and it does.

On this occasion Ulmer has a reasonable budget to work with and it shows. The movie is visually reasonably impressive.

Louis Hayward is in splendid form. The other cast members are all quite competent.

The movie is fairly sympathetic to the revolutionaries, or at least to moderate revolutionaries such as Sirocco. Politically Sirocco falls halfway between being a reformist and a true revolutionary. You don’t really have to worry too much about the politics. The movie is perhaps a little naïve in that department anyway. This film can be enjoyed as a straightforward romantic swashbuckler.

The Pirates of Capri is energetic fun. It’s Ulmer’s only swashbuckler although a few years later he did attempt an historical epic with Hannibal, an unjustly neglected movie.

Louis Hayward’s performance and Ulmer’s lively direction make The Pirates of Capri an enjoyable experience. Highly recommended.

This is a hard-to-find movie. I came across a French DVD from Artus Films which includes the English version (with removable subtitles) and it offers an acceptable transfer. There are no extras. That DVD is still in print and it’s your best chance of seeing this movie.

The Big Trail (1930)

Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail was an early attempt to make a truly epic western. Fox (this was before the merger that created 20th Century-Fox) not only spent a fortune on the film they also decided to shoot it in an all-new experimental format which they called Grandeur. This was the first widescreen process to be used in Hollywood.

The timing could not have been worse. By the time the movie was ready to go out the Depression was starting to bite. Added to this movie theatre owners were still reeling from the expense of converting to sound. There was no way anyone was going to spend the money required to convert theatres to allow The Big Trail to be screened in the Grandeur format.

The idea of an epic western was also fairly new and perhaps movie-goers were not ready for it. The Big Trail performed poorly at the box office.

The legend has it that this was the movie that should have made John Wayne a star but ended up setting back his bid for stardom by a decade. Personally I think that in 1930 John Wayne was just not ready for stardom. His performance here has none of the effortless quality that characterised his later great performances. He seems a bit nervous and and a bit tentative. When he did finally achieve star status he was ready and in full command of himself as an actor.

The Big Trail is concerned with a huge wagon train full of settlers heading west. Breck Coleman (John Wayne) has been hired as a scout. The wagon boss is a disreputable character named Red Flack (played by Tyrone Power’s dad Tyrone Power Sr). Flack has with him his equally disreputable pal, Lopez.

Coleman signed on as scout because of Red Flack, and because of an old friend of Coleman’s. He very strongly suspects that Flack and Lopez murdered that old friend. Coleman intends to make them pay. He has no intention of turning them over to the proper authorities. That’s not how frontier justice works. He simply intends to kill both men.

Coleman has other things on my mind, principally one of the would-be settlers, Ruth Cameron (Marguerite Churchill). He got off on the wrong foot with her and she hates him but he’s still sure she’s the girl for him.

Gambler and con-man Bill Thorpe (Ian Keith) is a complication. He has also set his eyes on Ruth and has told her stories of his vast plantation in Louisiana. In fact Thorpe owns nothing but the clothes on his back but he’s a charming liar and Ruth believes him. He will cause lots of problems.

The trek to the West is an ordeal. There are constant setbacks, wagons are lost in river crossing, many settlers die crossing 500 miles of desert and there’s a full-scale battle with the Cheyenne. The wagon train pushes on regardless, while Coleman watches and waits for his opportunity to avenge his friend.

These were the very early days of sound pictures, when those pictures were very static and studio-bound. Raoul Walsh wasn’t having any of that nonsense. He intended to shoot on location with live sound, and he did.

This was an insanely ambitious movie. The scale of the movie is breathtaking. Every shot seems to include several hundred extras. There are huge numbers of wagons. This is not the sort of wagon train you see in most westerns. This is like a vast army of settlers on the march.

Walsh’s shot compositions are incredibly busy, there is so much happening in the foreground and the background, but they work. This is spectacle in the best sense of the word. And this was 1930. Walsh could not rely on special effects. If he wanted a scene with dozens of wagons being lowered down a sheer cliff-face the only way to do it was to lower dozens of wagons down a sheer cliff-face, which is what he did. Those kinds of scenes look real in a way that modern CGI never does look real. They look real because they were real.

There are some problems. The pacing is slow at times. The plot doesn’t have much complexity. Many of the supporting actors were forced on Walsh by the studio. He wasn’t happy with them, and he was right. Many of them are terrible. Tyrone Power Sr is just awful. The acting of most of the supporting cast members is stiff and some of the dialogue scenes are rather cringe-inducing. There is irritating comic relief, and there’s too much of it.

John Wayne is OK, but he’s not yet the real John Wayne, the John Wayne of his great movies. Marguerite Churchill on the other hand is very good (her performance is the best in the movie).

You have to make allowances for the fact that this was 1930. The conquest of the West was not something that happened in the distant past. There were plenty of people still living who took part in that conquest, and had first-hand memories of the Wild West. The director of the movie, Raoul Walsh, was personally acquainted with Wyatt Earp (and Earp and John Ford were good buddies). The West had an emotional resonance with Americans in 1930 that is difficult to imagine today. The triumphalist “planting civilisation in the wilderness” message is understandable when you take these things into account.

Somehow The Big Trail manages to overcome its flaws. The visual magnificence helps a great deal. What also helps is the total lack of modern fashionable irony. Whatever you think about the conquest of the West there is no denying that those pioneers had guts. This movie takes their courage seriously, and it takes their suffering seriously.

Watching this movie in its correct aspect ratio on Blu-Ray is an overwhelming experience. If you’re serious about classic movies it’s one that you have to see. And it’s one of the great Hollywood epics. With all its problems it’s still highly recommended.

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.