Klute (1971)

Well, after watching The Parallax View for the first time recently, I immediately became hungry for any and all paranoid thrillers, especially those from the seventies. Naturally, my first step was to check out the other two titles in Alan J. Pakula’s so-called ‘paranoia trilogy.’ Enter today's film: Klute. It had never drawn my attention before, but after discovering the pedigree behind it and the fact that it was a murder-mystery-thriller, I decided to finally pull the trigger and order myself a copy. 

To my surprise, despite this being considered part of a piece with The Parallax View, Klute really could not be any more different than it as a film. It’s a character study for one thing; far more concerned with the psychology and humanity of prostitutes, addicts, and those who control them - dealers, pimps, or bullying police - than it is playing spinning a complex web of murky conspiracy. It even prominently features a romantic subplot, just when you’d think the murder mystery should really be picking up.

The premise is a little… well, strange. When a prominent executive at a chemical plant goes missing for over a year and nothing is found out, another executive who was close to him calls up private detective and family friend John Klute to pick up the pieces and hopefully make some headway. The only clue Klute has to go off, however, is a single letter found in his office that was addressed to a high-profile call girl in New York, and so of course, the first place he goes is to see about her. When he arrives to question the girl in question, young Bree Daniels, she either doesn’t know or doesn’t remember the missing executive, and so it looks like the case has officially gone cold... at least until Klute comes to suspect that someone is surveilling Daniels and that her life may be in danger. Before you know it, both Klute and Daniels are forced to work together to attempt to get to the bottom of a convoluted conspiracy featuring all sorts of sordid characters who will stop at nothing to get off, sexually or otherwise.

Despite what all this might sound like, the real protagonist of this film is undoubtedly Bree, portrayed by Jane Fonda in a role that would win her her first Oscar and help establish her as a household name. You see, she’s a call girl... in a film from '71, I'll remind you. No one would expect her to be anything but a hooker with a heart of gold, yet again and again she subverts this trope and still manages to win our hearts every time. The filmmakers ride the line perfectly: she’s not happy with her life in the sense that nobody is really ever completely satisfied with the way things are going for them, but she’s not walking around miserable because of her nontraditional lifestyle either. In fact, she describes the feeling of being with a john as almost triumphant: where for a moment she’s the “best actress in the world.” Her line of work is also often contrasted with that of movie stars and models in a few scenes of her auditioning for various 'legitimate' jobs, and we see that, if anything, those gigs are more humiliating and give Bree less autonomy than she has as a prostitute. She tells her therapist at one point that in her line of work, she has no bosses: no directors, no predatory producers, no one. She’s in total control, which is implied to be a big motivation behind her decision to do what she does. When she finds herself falling for Klute later in the film, she feels scared and helpless, and suddenly sex becomes an entirely different thing to her. One can see why she’s drawn to sex work, then, even if only because, like many famed madams of old, Bree’s character is implied to have been sexually abused as a child. Or at least, that's what Jane Fonda says about the character.

One fascinating detail about Bree that I find interesting in the context of the film as a product of paranoia is her confession that her vivid imagination - the very reason she’s such a natural-born sex worker in the first place - has occasionally caused her to become paranoid and see patterns and secret motivations where none probably exist. Is the film implying that the very things that make her so effective in her work will one day consume her as her mind decays? I’m not sure, but I found it a very interesting throwaway line considering the film’s status as a part of the ‘paranoia trilogy.’

But enough about her for now. How about Klute, the film’s namesake? Well, no offense to the big ole’ lug, but I can’t help but wonder, like several other critics have since the film’s original release, exactly why the film is named after him at all. He’s important to the story, yes, but there’s no doubt he’s playing second banana to Bree, even once the two of them become romantically involved. Still, the two characters complement each other well. You see, Klute is a quiet and by-the-book sort of guy. When Bree propositions him for sex as bribery, he doesn’t even seem to acknowledge it all. At first, this merely seems like the result of a character being both underwritten and underperformed, but by the end, it becomes clear that this just is Klute’s character. He’s a quiet, responsible, motherly type who comes to care a lot for Bree. He doesn’t take advantage of her or boss her around, and while he’s protective to an extent that might seem unhealthy (watching her sleep, for instance) he does believe her life is in danger after all. It’s a very interesting romance, then, that develops between the two characters, although I couldn’t help but feel like barfing when I first realized the film was going in this direction. Far from obligatory though, this romance feels central to the film if only because it’s a primary way for the film to develop and provoke Bree’s character, rather than a time-killing distraction between breaks in the murder case as it generally would be in most Hollywood films.

Overall, the film’s treatment of its characters, especially the very lowest of them, is very humane and rather progressive. It’s nice watching a film where a woman calls the shots, and when she returns home, she’s got a faithful man waiting for her to tuck her in and wipe the sweat from her brow when she wakes up in a cold sweat and that sort of thing. It could have only been better if Klute had donned a gingham apron and cooked her breakfast at some point.

Its surprisingly nuanced treatment of its characters even extends to its primary villain. While he is undeniably depicted as dangerous, there is a lot of psychology going on in the things he says. He’s a family man with bottled-up violent sexual urges that were awakened by a prostitute, possibly even Bree. He acts as a foil to Bree because she believes that people should “...do it all.” “Nothing is wrong,” she says over and over. “I think the only way that any of us can ever be happy is to let it all hang out." This is a reasonable attitude to people of 2023, sure, but the villain offers a compelling rebuttal of this: his sexual urges might have never killed anyone if they’d stayed locked away. Perhaps it’s inevitable they would have surfaced eventually, maybe you’d argue, or perhaps it's the repression of such feelings that warped them so terribly in the first place, but in either case, his role in the film complicates Klute's themes, and keeps you thinking long after the credits roll. Furthermore, the villain drives home the point that it’s dangerous out there for sex workers. If they don’t get thrown in prison or strung out on dope, they’ll probably get killed by some truck driver with a murder fetish one day when they least expect it. At one point, a female prostitute who is friends with Bree accepts a date with a man she knows for a fact is dangerous, simply because she’s broke and needs money to get high, and sure enough, she pays for her decision with her life. And do you think the police are worried about finding her killer?

*spoilers start*

It’s all concluded with a perfect ending to Bree's story and overall arc. She tells her psychiatrist that she wants to get out of the city for a while, but that she’s been thinking it over and doesn’t know if she’ll ever stop tricking or give up her independence to be like other women. As she’s saying this in voiceover, however, we see her packing up and leaving with none other than Klute. Sure, maybe he’s just seeing her out, or perhaps she does truly plan to dump him soon after, but it’s also worth noting that he’s stated several times to live out in the country. Not to mention, before she leaves, a potential john calls asking for a date and is informed that she won’t be around anymore. So needless to say, they leave things open-ended: “Will she or won’t she?” The end result is that they offer a chance of brighter days without selling out the character or implying that her lifestyle is really all that bad, despite its dangers. So from top-to-bottom, Bree Daniels is a fantastic character who is done complete justice by the material and Alan J. Pakula’s incredible direction.

*end of spoilers*

But what of the film as a film rather than a narrative? Well, as with The Parallax View, I really, really appreciate Pakula’s understated direction and the fluidity of the way the film moves as a piece of visual storytelling. Yes, there is a lot of dialogue, but it's only expository in the sense that it helps us understand our characters better, which is crucial in a character study like this. He makes the best of his performers and turns in a film that feels deceptively effortless and light in terms of style, another thing that helps one become immersed in the visuals. So while some could argue that the tense thriller setpieces could have been a bit tenser, or that the mystery shouldn’t have been solved for us so early in the film (the film keeps showing us a character that they would like us to believe is completely unimportant doing shady shit in his office at regular intervals) I think all of those criticisms ignore that this film isn’t standard genre fare, like what I honestly kind of wanted going into it myself. It’s doing its own thing and I think that’s fine, although that doesn’t mean it’s entirely without its moments of creeping dread, especially later on in the film. The biggest contributor to the paranoid vibe and overall sense of mystery is Michael Small’s incredible score, which is creepy enough to turn even a few otherwise limp scenes where nothing much happens into terrifying endeavors. The xylophone/flexatone/whatever-it-is mixed with some truly chilling dissonant vocalizations make for some high-octane nightmare fuel, especially considering how seldom the film goes there.

And so that’s Klute. Those going in hoping for more of The Parallax View (like I did) might find themselves disappointed: this isn’t the miserably bleak and nihilistic masterpiece that it was, but rather a masterpiece of another stripe. The Parallax View didn’t quite plumb the depths of its characters this deep, for one thing, though it didn’t really need to either. By contrast, Klute doesn’t need to end on a downer to make its point, and so it allows us and its characters a chance to relax and imagine there might be a light at the end of the tunnel. For those just looking for a solid murder mystery with a believable resolution, you'd likely be satisfied even if the film didn't take a remarkably progressive magnifying glass to American society in the '70s. For cineastes who are willing to jump into just about any genre of film provided its pedigree is well-established, this film is further proof that Alan J. Pakula is one of the great American directors, one whose best work contributes mightily to the single-greatest decade in cinematic history.