Klute. (15.)
Directed by Alan J. Pakula.
Starring Donald Sutherland, Jane Fonda, Charles Cioffi, Roy Scheider, Dorothy Tristan and Rita Gam. 111 mins. Released on Blu-ray as part of the Criterion Collection.
There is no time but the present. Though we know it's coming the future is viewed with a degree of believe-it-when-I-see-it scepticism and in the same way, I think we subconsciously find it hard to accept the past was ever really the present. At least as far as films go. It is almost unconscionable to think that people in black and white didn't know that they were historical and I think that goes for most films from the last century, even the colour ones.
Klute is an early 70s New York-set thriller that won Jane Fonda her first Oscar and is full of modish visuals, dark lighting, odd camera angles and braless women. It should seem dated, even quaint, but the film has a strident pride in being Now. In the opening scene, there is a shot of a mini tape recorder that must have been the latest thing. Even though we don't use cassettes any more it still looks pretty snazzy. On the tape is captured Fonda talking about the need to challenge convention and let it all hang out. It's so vibrantly 1971, so sure that there can be nothing as vital to come after this.
It is made up of all these modish elements and counter-culture attributes, that when put together somehow all add up to square.
It's a thriller, of sorts. The first scene is a big family dinner, at thanksgiving. It all seems very happy, focused on the affluent husband and his wife; so we know something is wrong there. By the next scene, he has disappeared and the police are linking him with a New York prostitute, Bree (Fonda.) When the police get nowhere, private investigator and family friend John Klute (Sutherland) takes on the case and focuses on Bree who is getting heavy breather calls and thinks she is being followed.
This investigation is no great shakes. A limited amount of deducting gets Klute to the solution and the film reveals the secret to us before it does to him, as a way of making sure we don't get too invested in finding out whodunit.
What the film has going for it is mood. This is down to everybody who worked on the film but for convenience, we'll focus on the contributions of director Pakula, cinematographer Gordon Willis and composer Michael Small. This was the beginning of Pakula's so-called trilogy of paranoia, continued with Kennedy assassination conspiracy fantasy The Parallax View and concluding with the Watergate drama All The President's Men. (Why are these paranoia dramas? In each one the threat is real.) Pakula started out as a producer – To Kill a Mockingbird is one of his – but as a director his legacy is really those three films, unless you have some strong feeling for Sophie's Choice or the Harrison Ford legal vehicle Presumed Innocent. He may not be one of the real greats, but those three films are right up there with the best works from the greatest era of American films.
He worked with Godfather cameraman Willis on each of them and Klute is one of the films that earned Willis his Prince of Darkness reputation. There are a few bright daylight scenes but every interior is as murky as possible. The scenes in Klute's Pennsylvania home have a washed-out look, drained of colour. In one vital scene, Fonda is shot in silhouette. There are lots of creepy overhead shots, of people in elevators or down through the roof of Bree's apartment.
Small's supplies a marvellously creepy theme, a tinkling on the piano that that sounds like a gentle breeze on wind chimes. It works like a restrained variation of the unnerving themes Morricone and the like were composing for the Italian Giallo films, or of the lusher themes Pino Donaggio would do for De Palma's many Hitchcock rip-offs.
Though he's the title character Sutherland is mostly a bystander to Fonda. At this point in her career, she was beginning the shift from blonde bombshell in light comedies – Cat Ballou, Barbarella – to “serious” actress, having already been Oscar nomed for They Shoot Horses, Don't They? but, though politically active, is yet enter her Hanoi Jane period. She is certainly good but I don't really get why contemporary critics were quite so effusive. I'm not sure I believed the character. (Or that hairdo which seems midway between Ziggy Stardust and Bradley Wiggins.) Upmarket hookers are always a male fantasy figure and though Fonda says she interviewed and knew real-life madams and call girls her struggles to feel anything, her confusion and anxiety when she starts to sense genuine affection for Klute is hard to buy into.
Spoiler - the film presents her as a fully rounded figure, respects her choices but by the end decides that she was just deluding herself. The flaw is not hers but with a script that wants to get down with the youth but then goes home with the steadfast out-of-towner.
Extras
New, restored 4K digital transfer, supervised by camera operator Michael Chapman, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
Directed by Alan J. Pakula.
Starring Donald Sutherland, Jane Fonda, Charles Cioffi, Roy Scheider, Dorothy Tristan and Rita Gam. 111 mins. Released on Blu-ray as part of the Criterion Collection.
There is no time but the present. Though we know it's coming the future is viewed with a degree of believe-it-when-I-see-it scepticism and in the same way, I think we subconsciously find it hard to accept the past was ever really the present. At least as far as films go. It is almost unconscionable to think that people in black and white didn't know that they were historical and I think that goes for most films from the last century, even the colour ones.
Klute is an early 70s New York-set thriller that won Jane Fonda her first Oscar and is full of modish visuals, dark lighting, odd camera angles and braless women. It should seem dated, even quaint, but the film has a strident pride in being Now. In the opening scene, there is a shot of a mini tape recorder that must have been the latest thing. Even though we don't use cassettes any more it still looks pretty snazzy. On the tape is captured Fonda talking about the need to challenge convention and let it all hang out. It's so vibrantly 1971, so sure that there can be nothing as vital to come after this.
It is made up of all these modish elements and counter-culture attributes, that when put together somehow all add up to square.
It's a thriller, of sorts. The first scene is a big family dinner, at thanksgiving. It all seems very happy, focused on the affluent husband and his wife; so we know something is wrong there. By the next scene, he has disappeared and the police are linking him with a New York prostitute, Bree (Fonda.) When the police get nowhere, private investigator and family friend John Klute (Sutherland) takes on the case and focuses on Bree who is getting heavy breather calls and thinks she is being followed.
This investigation is no great shakes. A limited amount of deducting gets Klute to the solution and the film reveals the secret to us before it does to him, as a way of making sure we don't get too invested in finding out whodunit.
What the film has going for it is mood. This is down to everybody who worked on the film but for convenience, we'll focus on the contributions of director Pakula, cinematographer Gordon Willis and composer Michael Small. This was the beginning of Pakula's so-called trilogy of paranoia, continued with Kennedy assassination conspiracy fantasy The Parallax View and concluding with the Watergate drama All The President's Men. (Why are these paranoia dramas? In each one the threat is real.) Pakula started out as a producer – To Kill a Mockingbird is one of his – but as a director his legacy is really those three films, unless you have some strong feeling for Sophie's Choice or the Harrison Ford legal vehicle Presumed Innocent. He may not be one of the real greats, but those three films are right up there with the best works from the greatest era of American films.
He worked with Godfather cameraman Willis on each of them and Klute is one of the films that earned Willis his Prince of Darkness reputation. There are a few bright daylight scenes but every interior is as murky as possible. The scenes in Klute's Pennsylvania home have a washed-out look, drained of colour. In one vital scene, Fonda is shot in silhouette. There are lots of creepy overhead shots, of people in elevators or down through the roof of Bree's apartment.
Small's supplies a marvellously creepy theme, a tinkling on the piano that that sounds like a gentle breeze on wind chimes. It works like a restrained variation of the unnerving themes Morricone and the like were composing for the Italian Giallo films, or of the lusher themes Pino Donaggio would do for De Palma's many Hitchcock rip-offs.
Though he's the title character Sutherland is mostly a bystander to Fonda. At this point in her career, she was beginning the shift from blonde bombshell in light comedies – Cat Ballou, Barbarella – to “serious” actress, having already been Oscar nomed for They Shoot Horses, Don't They? but, though politically active, is yet enter her Hanoi Jane period. She is certainly good but I don't really get why contemporary critics were quite so effusive. I'm not sure I believed the character. (Or that hairdo which seems midway between Ziggy Stardust and Bradley Wiggins.) Upmarket hookers are always a male fantasy figure and though Fonda says she interviewed and knew real-life madams and call girls her struggles to feel anything, her confusion and anxiety when she starts to sense genuine affection for Klute is hard to buy into.
Spoiler - the film presents her as a fully rounded figure, respects her choices but by the end decides that she was just deluding herself. The flaw is not hers but with a script that wants to get down with the youth but then goes home with the steadfast out-of-towner.
Extras
New, restored 4K digital transfer, supervised by camera operator Michael Chapman, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- New interview with actor Jane Fonda, conducted by actor Illeana Douglas
- New program about Klute and director Alan J. Pakula by filmmaker Matthew Miele, featuring interviews with film scholar Annette Insdorf, filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, and actor Charles Cioffi, along with archival interviews with Pakula
- The Look of “Klute,” a new interview with writer Amy Fine Collins
- Archival interviews with Pakula and Fonda
- “Klute” in New York, a short documentary made during the shooting of the film
- PLUS: An essay by critic Mark Harris and excerpts from a 1972 interview with Pakula
