Klute (Gus Productions, Warner Bros., 1971)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later my husband Charles and I watched a Turner Classic Movies showing of the 1971 film Klute, produced and directed by Alan J. Pakula based on a screenplay by Andy and David E. Lewis, starring Jane Fonda in the first of her two Academy Award-winning roles as call girl Bree Daniel (or is it “Daniels”? We hear it both ways in the film, though “Daniel” is how it’s spelled in the credits) and Donald Sutherland as John Klute, former police detective from Tuscarora, Pennsylvania who steps down from the force and becomes a private detective to trace his best friend, Tom Gruneman (Robert Milli), at the behest of his wife Trina (veteran character actress Rita Gam, who’s probably best known for playing the wife of Hannibal in Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1960 European-made film, with Victor Mature in the title role). Gruneman’s family has got copies of obscene letters he’s been writing to various New York prostitutes, including Bree Daniel, and he hasn’t been heard from at all for six months. I first saw this film when my mother took me to it during its initial theatrical release in 1971, and I don’t recall ever having seen it again until last night. When it first came out Klute was considered especially daring for casting Jane Fonda not only as a prostitute but one who wasn’t guilt-ridden or ashamed, but was proud of what she did for a living and how she made her clients feel (though over a decade earlier Melina Mercouri had played a similar role in Never on Sunday).

Today it’s still a good movie but it’s also badly dated; we get to eavesdrop on Bree’s sessions with her therapist (Vivian Nathan) in scenes William K. Everson in The Detective in Film suspected were added after the rest of the film was complete. We also hear a lot of Bree’s sessions with her clients in recordings secretly made on miniature reel-to-reel tape recorders (cassettes already existed when this film was made and were what real-life detectives, eavesdroppers and voyeurs would have been using in 1971), and ultimately we realize that Bree is being stalked by a former client who gets off on beating up women. The mystery, to the extent there is one, is who the client is and why he’s killing the women he’s been with; one of them is already dead by the time John Klute gets to New York and starts his investigation, while a second, Arlyn Page (Dorothy Tristan in a vivid portrayal of a piece of human flotsam that was one of the few things I remembered about this film from 1971), has become a heavy-duty drug addict and has worked her way down through various madams until she’s hooked up with a pimp who keeps her well supplied. Arlyn’s body is found floating in one of New York’s rivers, and by this time Bree and Klute have become lovers and she’s trying to deal for the first time in her life with experiencing sex as an expression of love rather than a job. (Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland were having an affair for real when they were making this film, and it lasted through one more movie – a documentary called F.T.A. in 1972 based on the alternative shows they were doing for U.S. servicemembers on their way to Viet Nam to what they considered the patriotic drivel being fed them by the official USO – before they broke up and Fonda began dating, and ultimately married, New Left activist Tom Hayden.)

The killer ultimately turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Peter Cable (Charles Cioffi), a 1-percenter who discovered he liked beating up women to within an inch of their lives when he started purchasing the services of prostitutes and realized just having paid-for sex wasn’t sufficiently turning him on. Cable’s matter-of-fact explanation as to why he’s doing what he’s doing and why he believes he has a perfect right to exploit people and kill them if they threaten to expose his secret is very much of the time and the radical-Left sympathies of many of the creative people involved in this film, Fonda and (to a lesser extent) Sutherland in particular. It also plays quite differently in the Donald Trump era than it did in 1971; then we just hated him but now we’re afraid that people like him will end up running the country (again). Klute is a good film but also a rather ponderous one; we get way too much explanation of what’s going on. What earned Jane Fonda her Academy Award was the sheer authority with which she plays Bree Daniel, staking out territory far different from the (stereo)typical portrayals of prostitutes then and now; though Bree is trying to break into modeling and acting (we see her rehearse a little-theatre production and we get to meet her as part of a cattle-call audition for a modeling job which she, naturally, doesn’t get), she’s proud of her skills as a sex worker and in particular her ability to make her johns believe that she’s having the time of her life with them when she isn’t. Indeed, there’s a throwaway line in the film in which she tells Klute early on in their sexual relationship that with him she’s experienced orgasm for the first time in her life. At the same time Jane Fonda was coming off a film, Barbarella, a science-fiction movie that cast her as an out-and-out nymphomaniac, so it’s not like audiences weren’t used to seeing her as a wanton woman pushing the envelope of conventional sexual morality.

The TCM showing of Klute was introduced by a man who’s been writing about Academy Award winners and how they felt on the Big Night, and in Jane Fonda’s case she felt embarrassed that she was winning a competitive Oscar while her father, Henry Fonda, never had. (Jane would win her second Best Actress Academy Award in 1978 for the anti-war film Coming Home; Henry wouldn’t win until his next-to-last film, On Golden Pond, in 1982, in which he and Jane played the father and daughter they in fact were.) When Jane Fonda was shooting Klute she already had to deal with a lot of hatred from the crew members; though she hadn’t taken the infamous trip to Hanoi in which she rode atop a turret with North Viet Namese gunners shooting at American bombers (that would happen in 1972 and would earn her the nickname “Hanoi Jane” and the enduring hatred of the American Right), her activities with the anti-war movement and the F.T.A. tour (the initials variously meant “Free the Army” and “Fuck the Army,” depending on how transgressive the people running it wanted to be at any given moment) had aroused the ire of many real-life crew members who supported the war and aligned themselves with the hard-hat-wearing counter-demonstraters who were beating up anti-war protesters on the streets of New York and other major cities. When Jane Fonda was nominated for Klute, she wisely sought counsel from her father as to what she would say if she won; he told her not to say anything political, so she didn’t – though she kinda-sorta hinted at it at the end.