When you think of the term “70s paranoia thriller”, you probably think of director Alan J. Pakula, even if you’re someone like me who hasn’t actually seen a ton of Pakula movies. He’s so synonymous with this decade-specific subgenre that people often forget that he directed a pretty notable film outside this genre in Sophie’s Choice (or at least I do). He even kept directing movies of this variety when his sensibilities still didn’t quite mesh with modern thrillers, as was the case with The Pelican Brief, one of our somewhat recent Picks. Well, Klute was where it all started. It’s the first movie in Pakula’s “paranoia trilogy” along with The Parallax View and All The President’s Men, and it also set the tone for a decade where everyone (including the president) was recording each other’s conversations.
John Klute (played by Donald Sutherland) is a cop from an unspecified town in Pennsylvania who is friends with a wealthy chemical company executive named Tom Gruneman. We see Klute gathered around a dining room table chatting with friends at a dinner party hosted by Gruneman in the first scene of the movie before we quickly cut to a much less jovial scene at the same table. The chair Gruneman was sitting at is empty and Klute is in cop mode, as him and a few police officers ask Gruneman’s wife about his disappearance and the fact that an obscene letter of his was found addressed to a New York City call girl named Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda). After finding little in the way of leads, Gruneman’s fellow chemical executive Peter Cable (Charles Cioffi) hires Klute to go to New York to see what he can find from talking to Bree and any other contacts that Gruneman may have made while in New York.
I don’t remember all the specifics of the plot, despite the fact that I just watched Klute last night, and it’s also probably not worth delving into spoilers for a movie that remains a little bit under-discussed. But basically, Klute goes to the big city and starts living in the basement of the building where Bree lives. He questions her about Gruneman, but she has trouble remembering him, though she does recall a john from a couple years ago who was violent with her who could have been Gruneman. They go down a rabbit hole of trying to find anyone who may have known him, such as other call girls who are very hard to find or Bree’s former pimp Frank Ligourin (Roy Scheider). As Bree and Klute become more entangled with each other over the course of this investigation, they inevitably become romantic. However, Bree isn’t entirely comfortable with being in a relationship where she’s not completely in control, and as they get ever closer to finding the killer, we find she’s got plenty of trauma to sort through.
There are a lot of technical aspects of Klute that deserve to be praised, but somehow the only categories the movie was nominated for at the Academy Awards was Best Original Screenplay and Best Actress, for which Jane Fonda won. This is an absolutely deserved Oscar win, since Fonda’s Bree is fascinating in every scene she’s in and Fonda brings a lot to the role both emotionally and intellectually. In the interview with Fonda that was done for Klute‘s 2019 Criterion release, she talks about how she used the role as a way of processing her feelings about the feminist movement, which she was at that time starting to embrace along with her other political interests. Fonda spent some time getting to know actual call girls in New York in preparation for the role and you can tell she has a lot of empathy for these types of women and in particular the violence that they often incur from men.
So Fonda brought a lot to the role that wasn’t there in the screenplay, such as her suggesting to Pakula that he change Bree’s psychiatrist to be a woman instead of a men, because she wouldn’t be as vulnerable as the script suggested with a male shrink. But at the same time, the script by brothers Andy and Dave Lewis gives Fonda plenty of compelling traits to work with. Apart from her dayjob turning tricks, Bree is also an aspiring actress, and the film often comments on the parallels between the so-called acting she has to do to pretend she’s enjoying having sex with someone and what stage actors do. I would say that the character is such an integral part of the film that it should’ve been called Bree instead of Klute, but apparently that’s far from an original thought since Roger Ebert made the same comment in his original 1971 review of the film.
This gets at my one real gripe with the film, and it’s that Klute himself just isn’t that intriguing of a character, which I feel a little bad saying since one of the reasons I chose this movie was because Donald Sutherland passed away a couple months ago. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily Sutherland’s fault though, as I do enjoy his goofy charm here. Also, I don’t think this character needs to be particularly eccentric, since he makes a good straight-shooter foil to the more complicated Bree. But I feel like the movie really goes out of its way to set up this situation where you have a small-town cop coming to the big city in this fish-out-of-water way, but it never really does much with that aspect of the story. Klute is just kind of there to watch the story unfold and tap some phones, but he’s just not all that well-defined, though I suppose his passiveness does make him a noticeable contrast to the other big screen cops that made a splash in 1971 – Dirty Harry, Shaft, and Popeye Doyle.
But for whatever slight shortcomings Klute may have in its script and title character, it more than makes up for in its chilling and atmospheric tone. This was the first of several films that Pakula shot with cinematographer Gordon Willis, and Willis really makes the most of the dark and shadowy visuals that he became known for when he shot The Godfather just a year later. The ’70s were a great time for New York movies, and the way this film presents the city at night during its seediest era keeps you on edge and gives the constant sense that someone must be following Klute and Bree with murderous intentions, whether they’re visible in the darkness or not. Michael Small’s eery score also stands out in helping the film realize its subterranean world, as its use of jangling piano keys and a lone woman’s voice sometimes veers the movie into horror territory. So all in all, a movie where a lot of people are working on a very high level to make this material transcend its detective movie status to become something more reflective of the paranoid times it was made in.