Jane Fonda’s Oscar-winning performance in 1971’s neo-noir classic Klute touches the sky. As sex worker Bree Daniels, Fonda weaves a performance out of performances. She goes from dejected after failing to book a modeling job, to itching to call her service and find a trick. In the hotel room she’s a conductor, playing a dull commuter of a john with seduction 101, checking her watch while in the act—one of the most famous shots in the movie—and then hitting the street after, refreshed, integrated and calm for a moment. Compartmentalization made flesh.
When she meets with her therapist, we know her style: half of what she says in session feels like deep personal insight, and the other half feels like a work. But all her feels are compelling. Legendary film critic Pauline Kael wrote that it was one of the strongest portrayals of a “feminine character” in American film. I’ll say it’s as good as performance as you’ll find in the whole of the hallowed ‘70s.
Fonda alone makes Klute a classic. But there’s more. Cinematographer Gordon Willis drowns Bree’s apartment with the darkness of late-era Rembrandt and blasts the outside spaces with merciless New York sun. The indelible score is all eerie coos and a jangling, serrated piano. Director Alan Pakula, the cardiothoracic surgeon of post-war American unease, never made a movie this intimate again. You can look into Klute and see today: sex and transactions and talk and intimacies and fantasies and violence, all potentially recorded at any time by any number of more powerful forces.
And one element in the film holds and stabilizes all that pulsing radioactive material like a shroud of lead: Donald Sutherland as detective John Klute. With his death last week, it feels time to make this clear: Klute is Sutherland’s crowning achievement. His work in M*A*S*H is wonderful. He’s harrowing in Don’t Look Now. His performance in Invasion of the Body Snatchers is sci-fi canon. A+ all around. But in Klute, Sutherland creates a minimalist masterpiece unlike anything else, even fifty years later.
John Klute is a small-town Pennsylvania police officer hired to find his childhood friend, an executive at a Lehigh Valley megacorporation (think DuPont) who has been missing for six months. Klute and his people look and sound like figures from an early season of Mad Men. Compared to Mayor Lindsay’s 1970s New York, they are trapped in amber.
Klute heads to the city, as his missing friend had apparently written a set of disturbing letters to sex workers he saw there. Eventually he meets one of them, Jane Fonda’s Bree. Together they search for what happened to Klute’s friend, and for who is stalking Bree. While everything else in the movie is terrific, the plot itself isn’t—any noir-head will pick out the villain fewer than 10 minutes in.
