Forget The Title, She's The Star

 Klute (1971) – A small town detective works with a cynical big city sex worker to solve the mystery of a missing man.

Directed by Alan J. Pakula

Starring Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Roy Scheider

Why I Liked It – Fonda is outstanding here, and the connection between her and her co-star is just as good.

This movie’s title should be “Bree”.  From the moment she appears on the screen this is Jane Fonda’s movie.  The performance would earn her an Oscar nomination and a win.  Bree (Fonda) is a wannabe actress that is struggling to find work.  Instead, she pays the bills through prostitution.  Even there, she’s fallen on hard times and is living in a small apartment rather than the high end place she’d once had.  Fonda gives Bree a careful mix of cynicism and once-burnt-twice-shy romanticism.  She is sexy and in control while shielding her vulnerability.  That changes when John Klute (Sutherland), a detective from a small town in Pennsylvania, comes looking for a missing man who may have been a customer.  They struggle to coexist in the search for a man who may have killed Klute’s friend and tried to kill Bree as well.

The story of Bree’s life as a call girl, one that is as much an psychological need as a financial one, is examined directly.  A decade earlier, a movie would have hinted at what went on behind closed doors.  In 1971, this movie walked to the edge of the R rating, and stayed there.  Even with that more up front approach, the story remains deliciously sexy and more subtle than today’s movies manage.  Fonda had made her career to that point in “sex kitten” roles (like the campy but bad “Barbarella”), so it was familiar territory.  What she brings to the deeper, more nuanced performance here is spectacular.

This is a movie with many familiar faces from the days before they were familiar names.  Fonda had a certain notoriety (and a famous father), Sutherland had starred as Hawkeye in the movie version of “M*A*S*H” the year before, Scheider would breakthrough with “The French Connection” the same year as “Klute” with “Jaws” coming four years later.  There’s even a cameo for Jean Stapleton, who might be the highest profile member of the cast.  She had launched her iconic role as Edith Bunker three years earlier in “All In The Family”.  All of them would rise to greater fame in the years that followed.

It’s an outstanding cast in a taut, chilling story.  Despite the title, it’s the cynical, sexy, broken young woman who stands at the heart of the story.

Rating – **** Recommended

A pretty standard trailer for the early ’70s.

Which means it is pretty awful.  The movie is MUCH better than this.