''Klute'' is a 1971 American
neo-noir
Neo-noir is a revival of film noir, a genre that had originally flourished during the post-World War II era in the United Statesroughly from 1940 to 1960. The French term, ''film noir'', translates literally to English as "black film", indicating ...
crime thriller
Crime fiction, detective story, murder mystery, mystery novel, and police novel are terms used to describe narratives that centre on criminal acts and especially on the investigation, either by an amateur or a professional detective, of a crime, ...
film directed and produced by
Alan J. Pakula
Alan Jay Pakula (; April 7, 1928 – November 19, 1998) was an American film director, writer and producer. He was nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Picture for ''To Kill a Mockingbird'' (1962), Best Director for ''All the President's Men ...
, written by Andy and Dave Lewis, and starring
Jane Fonda
Jane Seymour Fonda (born December 21, 1937) is an American actress, activist, and former fashion model. Recognized as a film icon, Fonda is the recipient of various accolades including two Academy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, sev ...
,
Donald Sutherland
Donald McNichol Sutherland (born 17 July 1935) is a Canadian actor whose film career spans over six decades. He has been nominated for nine Golden Globe Awards, winning two for his performances in the television films ''Citizen X'' (1995) an ...
,
Charles Cioffi
Charles M. Cioffi (born October 31, 1935) is an American film and television actor best known as Lt. Matt Reardon in ''Get Christie Love!'' opposite co-star Teresa Graves.
Born in New York City, he attended Michigan State University, where he ...
, and
Roy Scheider
Roy Richard Scheider (; November 10, 1932 – February 10, 2008) was an American actor and amateur boxer. Described by AllMovie as "one of the most unique and distinguished of all Hollywood actors", he gained fame for his leading and supporting ...
. The film follows a high-priced
call girl
A call girl or female escort is a sex worker who (unlike a street walker) does not display her profession to the general public, nor does she usually work in an institution like a brothel, although she may be employed by an escort agency.< ...
who assists a detective in solving a
missing persons
A missing person is a person who has disappeared and whose status as alive or dead cannot be confirmed as their location and condition are unknown.
A person may go missing through a voluntary disappearance, or else due to an accident, crime, de ...
case.
It is the first installment of what has informally come to be known as Pakula's "paranoia trilogy". The other two films are ''
The Parallax View
''The Parallax View'' is a 1974 American political thriller film produced and directed by Alan J. Pakula, and starring Warren Beatty, Hume Cronyn, William Daniels and Paula Prentiss. The screenplay by David Giler and Lorenzo Semple Jr. was based ...
'' (1974) and ''
All the President's Men
''All the President's Men'' is a 1974 non-fiction book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, two of the journalists who investigated the June 1972 break-in at the Watergate Office Building and the resultant political scandal for ''The Washington ...
'' (1976).
''Klute'' was theatrically released in the United States on June 25, 1971, by
Warner Bros
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (commonly known as Warner Bros. or abbreviated as WB) is an American film and entertainment studio headquartered at the Warner Bros. Studios complex in Burbank, California, and a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Di ...
, to critical and commercial success. Reviewers praised the film's direction, screenplay and most notably Fonda's performance, while the film grossed over $12 million against a $2.5 million budget. It received two nominations at the
44th Academy Awards
The 44th Academy Awards were presented April 10, 1972, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. The ceremonies were presided over by Helen Hayes, Alan King, Sammy Davis Jr., and Jack Lemmon. One of the highlights of the evening was the ...
;
Best Original Screenplay
The Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay is the Academy Award for the best screenplay not based upon previously published material. It was created in 1940 as a separate writing award from the Academy Award for Best Story. Beginning with the ...
, with Fonda winning
Best Actress
Best Actress is the name of an award which is presented by various film, television and theatre organisations, festivals, and people's awards to leading actresses in a film, television series, television film or play. The first Best Actress awar ...
.
Plot
A Pennsylvania chemical company executive, Tom Gruneman, disappears. The police find an obscene letter in Gruneman's office addressed to a New York City
call girl
A call girl or female escort is a sex worker who (unlike a street walker) does not display her profession to the general public, nor does she usually work in an institution like a brothel, although she may be employed by an escort agency.< ...
named Bree Daniels, who had received several such letters. After six months of fruitless police work, Peter Cable, a fellow executive at Gruneman's company, hires family friend and detective John Klute to investigate Gruneman's disappearance.
Klute rents an apartment in the basement of Bree's building, taps her phone, and follows her as she turns tricks. Bree appears to enjoy the freedom of freelancing as a call girl while auditioning for acting and modeling jobs, but she reveals the emptiness of her life to her psychiatrist. Bree refuses to answer Klute's questions at first. After learning that he has been watching her, Bree says she does not recognize Gruneman. She acknowledges being beaten by a
john
John is a common English name and surname:
* John (given name)
* John (surname)
John may also refer to:
New Testament
Works
* Gospel of John, a title often shortened to John
* First Epistle of John, often shortened to 1 John
* Second ...
two years earlier, but cannot identify Gruneman from a photo. Bree takes Klute to meet her former pimp, Frank Ligourin, who managed Jane McKenna, a prostitute who referred the abusive client to Bree. McKenna has apparently committed suicide and their other colleague Arlyn Page has since become a drug addict and disappeared.
Klute and Bree develop a romance, although she tells her psychiatrist that she wishes she could go back to "just feeling numb" turning tricks. She tells Klute she is paranoid that she is being watched. They find Page, who tells them that the photo of Gruneman is not the client, who was an older man instead. Page's body is later found in the river. Klute connects the "suicides" of the two prostitutes, surmising that the client was using Gruneman's name. He also thinks the client killed Gruneman and might kill Bree next. Klute revisits Gruneman's acquaintances. By typographic comparison, the obscene letters are traced to Cable, to whom Klute has been reporting during his investigation. Klute asks Cable for money to buy the "
black book" of McKenna's clients to learn the identity of the abusive client. He leaves enough
bread crumbs
Bread crumbs or breadcrumbs (regional variants including breading and crispies) consist of crumbled bread of various dryness, sometimes with seasonings added, used for breading or crumbing foods, topping casseroles, stuffing poultry, thickeni ...
to see whether Cable reveals his own complicity in the murders.
Cable follows Bree to a client's office and reveals that he sent her the letters. After Gruneman accidentally found him physically abusing McKenna, Cable was worried Gruneman would use the incident to sabotage his career. Cable tried to frame Gruneman by planting the letter in his office. After playing an audiotape he made as he murdered Page, he attacks Bree. When he sees Klute rush in, Cable abruptly lurches backward to get away, crashing through a window to his death.
Bree moves out of her apartment with Klute's help. A
voiceover
Voice-over (also known as off-camera or off-stage commentary) is a production technique where a voice—that is not part of the narrative (non-diegetic)—is used in a radio, television production, filmmaking, theatre, or other presentations. ...
conversation with her psychiatrist reveals her hesitancy to give up her life of autonomy to be in a traditional relationship with Klute, saying she'd go out of her mind if she turned to a domestic lifestyle. She admits that although she will miss Klute, she is unable to tell him, and jokes that the doctor will likely see her again the next week. As they leave the apartment, Bree gets a telephone call from a client; she tells him she is leaving New York and does not expect to return. She and Klute leave the apartment together.
Cast
In addition:
Robert Milli
Robert A. Milli (March 15, 1933 – July 18, 2019) was an American television actor.
Early years
Milli was born in Brooklyn, New York, and studied theater at Catholic University and the University of Maryland.
Career
Milli was perhaps best kno ...
appears briefly as Tom Grunerman, Trina's murdered husband;
Jean Stapleton
Jean Stapleton (born Jeanne Murray; January 19, 1923 – May 31, 2013) was an American character actor, character actress of stage, television and film.
Stapleton was best known for playing Edith Bunker, the perpetually optimistic and dev ...
appears as a secretary; and
Sylvester Stallone
Sylvester Enzio Stallone (; born Michael Sylvester Gardenzio Stallone, ) is an American actor and filmmaker. After his beginnings as a struggling actor for a number of years upon arriving to New York City in 1969 and later Hollywood in 1974, h ...
appears as an uncredited extra in a club scene.
Production
Development
To prepare for her role as Bree, Jane Fonda spent a week in New York City observing high-class call girls and
madams
Procuring or pandering is the facilitation or provision of a prostitute or other sex worker in the arrangement of a sex act with a customer. A procurer, colloquially called a pimp (if male) or a madam (if female, though the term pimp has still ...
; she also accompanied them on their outings to after hours clubs to pick up men. Fonda was disturbed that none of the men showed interest in her, which she believed was because they could see that she was really just an "upper-class, privileged pretender".
Fonda had doubts about whether she could portray the role and asked Alan Pakula to release her from her contract and hire
Faye Dunaway
Dorothy Faye Dunaway (born January 14, 1941) is an American actress. She is the recipient of List of awards and nominations received by Faye Dunaway, many accolades, including an Academy Awards, Academy Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, three Golden ...
instead, but Pakula refused. One of Fonda's first concerns was that she, as a nascent feminist, should not even be playing a prostitute. Fonda confided this concern to a more longstanding feminist who disabused her of this notion. To get past the sense that she just wasn't hooker material, Fonda turned to her memories of several call girls she had known while living in France, all of whom worked for the famed
Madame Claude
Fernande Grudet (6 July 1923 – 15 December 2015), also known as Madame Claude, was a French brothel keeper. In the 1960s, she was the head of a French network of call girls who worked especially for dignitaries and civil servants.
Biograp ...
. She remembered that all of them had been sexually abused as children, and Fonda used this as an "entry" to her own character, and as a way to understand Bree's motivations in becoming a prostitute.
Release
Home media
''Klute'' was released on DVD in 2005, and on Blu-ray by
The Criterion Collection
The Criterion Collection, Inc. (or simply Criterion) is an American home-video distribution company that focuses on licensing, restoring and distributing "important classic and contemporary films." Criterion serves film and media scholars, cinep ...
in July 2019.
Reception
Box office
The film earned US$8 million () in theatrical rentals at the North American box office.
Critical response
![Jane Fonda Cannes 2018](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Jane_Fonda_Cannes_2018.jpg)
''Klute'' was praised for its screenplay and Fonda's performance. On Rotten Tomatoes, ''Klute'' holds an approval rating of 93% based on 40 reviews, with an average rating of 8.19/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "Donald Sutherland is coolly commanding and Jane Fonda a force of nature in ''Klute'', a cuttingly intelligent thriller that generates its most agonizing tension from its stars' repartee." On Metacritic, which assigns a rating to reviews, the film has a weighted average score of 81 out of 100, based on 47 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".
The New York Times wrote, “Pakula, when he is not indulging in subjective camera, strives to give his film the look of structural geometry, but despite the sharp edges and dramatic spaces and cinema presence out of ‘Citizen Kane’ it all suggests a tepid, rather tasteless mush. The acting in ‘Klute’ seems semi-improvisatory, and in this Jane Fonda, who is good at confessing, is generally successful. Everybody else merely talks a lot, except for Sutherland, who scarcely talks at all. A normally inventive actor, he is here given precisely the latitude to evoke a romantic figure with all the mysterious intensity of a youthful Calvin Coolidge.”
Roger Ebert of ''The Chicago Sun-Times'' gave ''Klute'' 3.5 stars out of a possible 4, writing that while the thriller elements were poorly executed, the performances of Sutherland and especially Fonda carried the film. He suggested that the film should have been titled ''Bree'' after her character, who is the soul of the movie and avoids the
hooker with a heart of gold
The hooker with a heart of gold is a stock character involving a courtesan or prostitute who possesses virtues such as integrity, generosity and kindness.
Characteristics
The character type is defined by morally positive traits, which are contra ...
stereotype:
"What is it about Jane Fonda that makes her such a fascinating actress to watch? She has a sort of nervous intensity that keeps her so firmly locked into a film character that the character actually seems distracted by things that come up in the movie."
Gene Siskel, in the
Chicago Tribune
The ''Chicago Tribune'' is a daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, United States, owned by Tribune Publishing. Founded in 1847, and formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" (a slogan for which WGN radio and television ar ...
, was appreciative: “More interesting than the mystery is the character of Bree….the nicest part of her character (due to the script and Miss Fonda’s fine performance) is that this prostitute doesn’t have a heart of gold. She’s a hungup little broad who, when cornered by violence or tenderness, will scratch and bite. Director Alan Pakula’s…crisply edited movie runs too long only in drawing out its conclusion….Sharp eyes will solve the mystery midway thru the film. Miss Fonda’s performance is superior to her most recent work in ‘They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?’….Sutherland…presents a controlled posture as the industrious detective. His low profile nicely balances Miss Fonda’s incendiary role.”
Fonda's performance received widespread praise. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus declared: "Fonda makes all the right choices, from the mechanics of her walk and her voice inflection to the penetration of the girl's raging psyche. It is a rare performance."
Klute
Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved on October 3, 2022
Accolades
References
External links
*
*
*
*
''Klute: Trying to See Her''
an essay by Mark Harris at the Criterion Collection
The Criterion Collection, Inc. (or simply Criterion) is an American home-video distribution company that focuses on licensing, restoring and distributing "important classic and contemporary films." Criterion serves film and media scholars, cinep ...
{{Authority control
1970s crime thriller films
1971 crime films
American crime thriller films
American detective films
American neo-noir films
1970s English-language films
Films about prostitution in the United States
Films directed by Alan J. Pakula
Films featuring a Best Actress Academy Award-winning performance
Films featuring a Best Drama Actress Golden Globe-winning performance
Films scored by Michael Small
Films set in apartment buildings
Films set in New York City
1970s American films