Klute (1971)

Klute was the first film in what many cinephiles call director Alan J. Pakula’s “paranoia trilogy” (the others were The Parallax View and All the President’s Men). It stars Donald Sutherland as detective John Klute, who’s investigating the disappearance of a family friend named Tom Gruneman. The trail leads him to Manhattan, where Tom was a possible client of a few call girls in the city. One of the call girls is named Bree Daniels, indelibly played by Jane Fonda.

Though the name of the film is called Klute, the story really seems to revolve around Bree as she is stalked by someone who is killing call girls. Klute stays close to her, staking out her apartment, tailing her and even recording her phone calls, since the stalker might have killed Gruneman or even be Gruneman himself trying to eliminate witnesses to a sordid lifestyle. As the plot thickens, Klute grows protective of Bree, and their relationship evolves into something beyond the watcher and the watched.

I wouldn’t give anything away if you haven’t seen it, but I will say that the climax of the movie involves Jane Fonda listening to a tape recording in an office in New York’s garment district, where all is revealed. This totally performance-driven scene is, to say the least, one of the most intense thriller finales I have ever seen on film.

In terms of the range of roles for women at this time, the offerings were pretty slim. On paper, Bree Daniels might have looked like yet another thin, misogynist-drawn hooker/victim character. Instead, Jane Fonda turned it into one of the best performances ever put on film, earning her an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA Award for best actress.

Klute is gritty, glamorous, funny, dark, sad and terrifying. It represents the very best of movies produced in the “Easy Riders/Raging Bulls” era of post-studio system filmmaking that spanned the late 1960s and 1970s, introducing filmgoers to names like Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese… a whole generation of directors and actors revered as some of the greatest artists the industry ever produced.

Watch the trailer: