Those 10 seconds of Arlyn screaming on tape while Bree sobs on camera was more frightening and more disconcerting than any overly graphic murder scene populating recent films.
shareI agree, this film is very strong in suggesting things.
"I don't discriminate between entertainment
and arthouse. A film is a goddam film."
I also agree. Very much so. You don't know exactly what's happening to her, but you her screaming and it sounds horrifying. Your imagination gets the best of me.
shareI met Dorothy Tristan, who so memorably plays Arlyn, several years after KLUTE was released when she was in Buffalo, NY, playing Blanche opposite Jon Voight as Stanley in the finest version of "A Streetcar Named Desire" I have ever seen. My friend who accompanied me had met Dorothy when she (my friend) was writing for Life Magazine and wrote an article on "End of the Road" in the late 1960s. So after "Streetcar" was over, the three of us went out for drinks and dinner. Dorothy (a highly underrated actress, and a terrifically nice person) told us she was quite unhappy with her experience on KLUTE. Not with Jane Fonda or Donald Sutherland, whom she adored, but with the director Alan Pacula. It seems Pacula did indeed film the scene when Arlyn was murdered. But he never told Ms. Tristan that he had no intention of including that scene in the movie, only the recording of it that the murderer plays for Jane Fonda at the climax of the movie. Pacula only filmed that scene because he thought it would sound much more realistic if it were actually played out on film. I don't blame Ms. Tristan for being angry (with that horrendous scene in the movie, Ms. Tristan may well have won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination or award) but, in all honesty, I think KLUTE is far more effective by only using the sounds of the murder scene, leaving it up to the audience's imagination to imagine exactly what was going on, and making the mystery element of KLUTE all the more frightening.
sharethank you for that excellent anecdote, sdiner. That's really fascinating. Wouldn't it be great for that footage to show up as a DVD extra someday?
And I have to agree with you -- the use of sound only makes that scene so much more creepy, and also gives Jane Fonda one of the best moments of her career (and, I would suggest, one of the seminal acting moments of the 1970s, an early and excellent bit of the stylish ultra-realism that we'd later see in All the Presidents Men, Chinatown, Godfather, Network, and all the other great Golden Age of the 70s films. Klute stands right there with them, and that scene is key.