What did you rate 'Klute' (1971)?

I'm glad you mentioned The Morning After. I've been meaning to see that one and always forget about it. I've put it in my queue. (And that movie reminded me that I also want to see Jagged Edge.)

Jane Fonda and her character are much more important to this movie than the thriller aspects. It's funny the movie is named Klute since Donald Sutherland and his character are nearly wiped off the screen by Fonda. He holds his own by underplaying, which makes him a nice contrast to Fonda's Bree. But it's her movie.

Fonda is so good in this she makes me re-evaluate every other actress whom I've considered extraordinary.


... Justin

I suppose both Fonda's character in Klute and Hackman's charater in 'The Conversation' are similar; they are both shuttered personalities and are observed in the claustrophic environmnent of an apartment in an urban setting. I tried watching 'The Conversation' several times and though I love Hackman that film never grew on me.

I just adored 'Klute'. As the film progresses Bree Daniel's fragile psychological walls are breached and that breach is picked up as the investigation into Gruneman's death intensifies and Bree is taken through the endgame of her call girl world culminating in that shattering scene in the clothing factory with the murderer Peter Cable.

Jane Fonda as Bree Daniels, the call girl/acctress is just superb. In the last scene with Cable, Fonda was meant to play it as frightened, but when the scene was shot, instead of putting accross fear, she cried spontaneous tears because of what her life had become and because of the wasted lives of the other women Cable had murdered. The juxtaposition of the powerful comfortably middle class murderers Cable's 'I am an important man; I have a position to maintain' with the pitiful lives of the prostitutes is truly heart-rending.

Nearly every scene is unforgetable from Fonda's painful rejection at a casting which she seeks to alleviate by organising a commuter 'trick', to the use of her acting abilities to create an exotic striptease for an old man, to the painful discovery of an old hooker friend's decline into addiction.

The camera angles are shot at such a way as to increase the sense of claustrophobia and the sense that Bree is being watched malignly and the strange piano score picks up on the incipient panic of every scene.

Look out also for a standout performance from Roy Schneider as her pimp but there are no weak performances in this film.

Donald Sutherland as the mild mannered detective 'Klute' is an effectively
comfortable counterpoint to the savage ammorality of Bree Daniel's world.

Bree Daniel's attempt to 'rescue' herself is tackled in very 70's manner in her discursive and very emotional relationship with her shrink, most of which was improvised and in her unwitting attachment to Sutherland's Klute. The development of their relationship is deftly handled as Bree moves from treating Klute as a 'John' to an awareness of his acceptance of her as a lovable woman in all of her guises.

The final scenes in which Bree attempts unsuccessfully to seek help from the people in her life with whom she shares a soley commercial relationship, force her to acknowledge her complete isolation and make for a powerful denouement.

Oh, that's right! I think I remember Jean Stapleton appearing. It's been over a year since I started this thread and that was the first and last time I saw Klute. Eventually, I'll have to revisit it.


...Justin