10 Films to Watch if You Like Klute

One good film leads to another at Cinema Paradiso. We pride ourselves on having an unrivalled selection of over 10,000 films on high-quality DVD, Blu-ray and 4K and are confident that we have the movie to suit every taste and mood. But what to watch next if a particular picture has caught your imagination? This series tells the story behind a screen classic and makes suggestions for further viewing. Our pick this month is Alan J. Pakula's thriller, Klute (1971), which feels disconcertingly prescient and relevant, given that it's marking its 50th anniversary.

For much of Hollywood's six-decade history, freedom of expression had been at a premium. In March 1930, the Production Code Administration had been established to monitor the content of motion pictures in order to ensure that audiences across the United States were not being indoctrinated or corrupted by dangerous social, political or religious ideas. During its first four years, the Code was honoured as much in the breach as in the observance, with the result that titles like Josef von Sternberg's Blonde Venus and Erle C. Kenton's Island of Lost Souls (both 1932) were able to tackle complex moral themes with a degree of intellectual maturity. The PCA took a firmer grip, however, after it demanded the removal of brief instances of nudity from WS Van Dyke's Tarzan and His Mate (1934). Indeed, from July 1934, Joseph I. Breen even controlled the kind of films the studios made by vetting scripts and issuing seals of approval that were essential if a picture was to reach a mainstream audience.

The Code was weakened by a 1952 Supreme Court ruling that decreed films were entitled to protection under the First Amendment guaranteeing free speech. But it wasn't until 1968 that the restrictions were finally removed and replaced by a ratings system that introduced the age brackets that had been in use elsewhere since the 1930s. Despite the shackles being off, it took film-makers a while to adjust to the prospect of being able to discuss adult themes in a grown-up manner and Alan J. Pakula's Klute (1971) was feted as one of the first features to make mature use of the new powers, as it chronicled a private eye's relationship with a prostitute without lurid sensationalism.

The Swiped Scenario

Screenwriting siblings Dave and Andy Lewis had spent the 1960s toiling in American television and were keen to make the transition to features. Recognising the vogue for thrillers, they hit upon the story of a private eye from the sticks encountering a streetwise prostitute when he comes to the big city on a missing person case. Speaking in 2013, Andy admitted that 'I swiped the topic, the female character, the environment, and the general course of the story from one different place or another.' His primary inspiration was a Saturday Evening Post serial from his youth about country boy who investigates his brother's murder. However, Lewis soon realised that he was more interested in the main female character, who was a combination of the free spirit played by Julie Christie in Richard Lester's Petulia (1968) and the troublesome thief essayed by Stefanie Powers in 'Zee', a 1969 episode of the short-lived Western series, Lancer (1968-70)

Despite the initial focus being on paranoia and 'the rube who turns the tables on the city slickers', the Lewises realised that they had an opportunity to go against the Hollywood grain by creating a female thriller character who set the agenda rather than 'react appropriately to whatever the man does or has going on'. When Warner Bros. bought the script and Alan J. Pakula signed up to direct, he recognised that there was little to be gained from producing a variation on Don Siegel's Coogan's Bluff (1968), in which Clint Eastwood's Arizona sheriff escorts a prisoner to New York. Instead, Pakula felt that John Klute should become lost in the crowd after he leaves Tuscarora, Pennsylvania to find the businessman friend who has seemingly gone missing after an assignation with a Manhattan hooker named Bree Daniels.

Making only his second feature after directing Liza Minnelli in The Sterile Cuckoo (1969), Pakula saw that the scenario gave him a chance to shake up the conventions of the Hollywood thriller. The narrative might have been rooted in the noir tradition of the shamus stumbling in the dark for clues, but Pakula regarded it as an urban Western whose gallant hero has no understanding of the terrain or the type of people who inhabit it, unlike the woman he is seeking to protect. But, as befits a contradictory picture that not only sets up a mystery that it resolves midway through, but also seethes with menace while containing little overt violence, Bree Daniels represents a radical departure from the kind of femme fatale who had led palookas astray in the monochrome noirs that had reflected the unease in postwar America. Outwardly, she's articulate, stylish and in control of herself and her clients. But, as she confides to her psychiatrist, she confesses to disliking what she has become and hopes to achieve a modicum of independence by becoming an actress or model because she dreads turning into a housewife who is meekly dependent upon her man.

Ultimately, Klute's bid to uncover the killer becomes less significant than Bree's attempt to discover herself. But Pakula uses the tension between the hardboiled cynicism of film noir and the prickly romanticism of the Woman's Picture to comment on the state of the nation after the upheavals of the 1960s. As a producer, Pakula had made a series of 'issue' pictures with director Robert Mulligan that had tackled racial prejudice (To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962), abortion (Love With a Proper Stranger, 1963), homosexuality (Inside Daisy Clover, 1965) and inner-city deprivation (Up the Down Staircase, 1967). Sadly, Mulligan has fallen out of critical favour and few of his films are available on disc in the UK. But Pakula took up the challenge of holding up a mirror to a country that was struggling to come to terms with the seismic changes that the Swinging Sixties had wrought upon every aspect of US society.

Casting Makes the Heart Go Fonda

If Bree Daniels was a distinct departure from the kind of screen prostitute played by Shirley MacLaine in Billy Wilder's Irma la Douce (1963), she also took Jane Fonda's career in an entirely new direction. As the daughter of Hollywood legend Henry Fonda, she had played the studio game in such diverse entertainments as Elliot Silverstein's Cat Ballou (1965), Arthur Penn's The Chase (1966) and Gene Saks's Barefoot in the Park (1967). But she had also hinted at a less conformist side in Edward Dmytryk's Walk on the Wild Side and George Cukor's The Chapman Report (both 1962), in which she had played women intrigued by sex. Hence, the press had dubbed her 'the American Bardot' after she took up with French director, Roger Vadim, who had made Brigitte Bardot a sex symbol in ...And God Created Woman (1956). Fonda indulged Vadim's kinkily mischievous side in Barbarella (1967), but she also sought to be taken seriously as an artist and returned Stateside to earn her first Oscar nomination for Sydney Pollack's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969), a gruelling allegory that was set against a dance marathon during the Great Depression.

Many believe that Fonda lost out on an Academy Award because of her opposition to the war in Vietnam and the nickname 'Hanoi Jane' was frequently hurled at her in the press. Moreover, she had sunk a good deal of her own money into the cause and, with her relationship with Vadim on the rocks, she needed the work. Yet, while she viewed Klute as a pivotal project - as it afforded her an opportunity to mould a character who reflected her own socio-political and artistic concerns - she had misgivings about the signals that playing a prostitute might send to her audience. Indeed, she told Pakula that he should cast Faye Dunaway after she had spent eight nights on New York's seedier side and convinced herself that she was 'not call-girl material'.

As she researched the role, however, Fonda began to respond to Bree's vulnerability and sense that she had too much class to be in such a sordid predicament. Some have suggested that Fonda's encounters with the sex workers she met impacted upon her nascent feminism and it's intriguing to note that the scenes with Bree's psychiatrist (Vivian Nathan) were improvised and drew on personal attitudes. Indeed, Pakula had around 90 minutes of footage to choose from for the six minutes he needed. Fonda also worked closely with costume designer Ann Roth in selecting the tight sweaters, midi skirts and high boots that gave Bree her modish look.

Fonda also sought out hairdresser Paul McGregor and told him to create a style that would distance her from her past. The result became iconic before Klute was released, however, as Fonda sported her new Shag cut in the mug shot that was taken by the Cleveland police after she was arrested at an anti-war demonstration in November 1970. Unusually for the time, Fonda also had a say in such décor details as the sketch of John F. Kennedy on the kitchen wall. Indeed, she slept in the apartment set throughout the shoot in order to stay locked into the milieu that is central to Bree's sense of identity, as she ceases to be herself whenever she leaves it, whether it's to attend auditions or meet clients. Thus, the intrusive nature of the crank phone calls and the unseemly aspects of the break-in are all the more disturbing for her and she uses her nights in Klute's bedsit to compose herself and regains a degree of control by insulting him after they sleep together because she feels she is becoming dependent.

Klute proves unable to prevent Bree from being spied upon and takes it hard when she seeks solace from her former pimp, Frank Ligourin (Roy Scheider), even though he has failed to prevent one of his girls from being murdered and another from becoming a junkie. He glowers across the dance floor, as Bree nestles into Frank's shoulder and Pakula teamed with cinematographer Gordon Willis and production designer George Jenkins to ensure that both Klute and Bree were frequently seen in isolation or shadow. They also made copious use of oblique camera angles. as well as doorways, stair wells, skylights and lift shafts to emphasise the unbridgeable distance between men and women.

Despite playing the eponymous character, Donald Sutherland had had to put up with the fact that several scenes focusing on Klute were cut to allow Pakula to retain the emphasis on Bree. Consequently, we get to know very little about the inexperienced detective who is way out of his depth in seeking to find his missing and potentially sinister friend. For all the close-ups, Klute remains an overgrown innocent and an outsider who is uncomfortable and out of place wherever he goes. In falling for Bree, he seeks to protect her and take her away from the netherworld that has enveloped her. But he actually endangers her by putting her off her guard and there's little wonder that Bree tells her therapist before she packs up and leaves New York that she may well find domesticity as cloyingly claustrophobic and debasing as prostitution.

In ending on this ambiguous note about whether Klute has rescued Bree or transported her to another place of incarceration, Pakula plays on the sense of paranoia that was gripping American in the early 70s. He was also testing the limits of the thriller format that had been established by Alfred Hitchcock. In preparing for the shoot, Pakula had watched such classics as Notorious (1946), Strangers on a Train (1951) and Psycho (1960). He had also read François Truffaut's transcript of the interviews with Hitch that Kent Jones would recalls in his 2015 documentary, Hitchcock/Truffaut. However, he had steered away from the Master of Suspense's example because he had once claimed that it was impossible to combine character study and melodrama, which is precisely what Pakula was seeking to do. The picture was a risk, as it sought to break the mould and there was no guarantee that critics and audiences were ready for such a wake-up call.

The Cult of Klute

Things got off to a shaky start on set when members of the crew made it clear that they didn't approve of Fonda's opinions on the war, the Black Panthers and President Richard Nixon. However, Pakula stood by her when she arrived to find that the Stars and Stripes had been draped across the soundstage. She also found such a staunch ally in Sutherland that she invited him to join the cast of the counterculture revue, F.T.A., whose progress around US Army bases was filmed by Francine Parker for a documentary that has barely been seen since.

However, Fonda's stance on the war sometimes frustrated those who agreed with her principles. Most notably, Jean-Luc Godard followed up their collaboration on Tout va bien with Letter to Jane (both 1972), a photo-essay challenging Fonda's political naiveté in touring North Vietnam that chimes in with other such Dziga-Vertov Group films as Wind From the East (1970), Lotte in Italia and Vladimir and Rosa (both 1971), which are all available to rent from Cinema Paradiso.

Feminists weren't sure what to make of Klute, either. Initially, Pakula and Fonda were lauded for producing what one commentator called 'a psychologically realistic portrait of a woman's inner conflict'. Critic Pauline Kael declared Bree 'one of the strongest feminine characters to reach the screen' in noting that while 'there have been countless movie prostitutes, this is perhaps the first major attempt to transform modern clinical understanding into human understanding and dramatic meaning'. The manner in which Pakula juxtaposed the audio tape of the unseen Bree controlling her session with a john and the way in which she is silently judged and dismissed during the modelling cattle call was picked up by many writing about the objectification and commodification of women.

But, while Bree is presented as the epitome of an intelligent, self-aware modern woman, closer analysis of the picture has led some to denounce the screenplay for its subtextual affirmation of the patriarchy. The therapy scenes have also been the subject of much discussion, as some insist that they gloss over the psychological traumas that might have driven Bree into sex work and the lasting damage it might be inflicting upon her. This has prompted some critics to suggest the film is more a neurotic study of male paranoia about women than it is a feminist tract. What is clear, however, is that few genre movies had previously provoked such heated debate and, in becoming a cult classic, Klute helped give the thriller a new socio-political purpose.

This was reinforced by the events that unfolded in the United States over the ensuing months, as Richard Nixon's administration was linked to the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Building in Washington, DC. Having placed so much emphasis on bugging and taped speech in Klute, Pakula was ideally placed to direct All the President's Men (1976), the five-time Oscar-winning account of how Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) and Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) uncovered the scandal that brought down the government.

In between times, Pakula also produced The Parallax View (1974), which pitched reporter Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) into a murderous conspiracy in tapping into both Watergate and the Kennedy assassination. Fiendishly complex and harrowingly plausible, this central strand in what became known as the 'paranoia trilogy' caught the mood of a country ill at ease with itself in much the same way as Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974) and Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor (1975). Yet, hopes that New Hollywood would continue to tackle pressing issues were soon dashed by the dawn of the blockbuster era that focused front office minds on big bucks, following the record-breaking box-office feats of Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975).

Despite some lukewarm reviews - with Variety sneeringly dismissing it as a 'mixed-up sex-crime pic' - it became clear that Klute had changed how many critics perceived Jane Fonda. In Life magazine, Richard Schickel opined that she had emerged as 'the finest actress of her generation with a mercurial, subtly shaded, altogether fascinating performance', while Pauline Kael had concluded in The New Yorker that her ability to deliver such a devastating performance without being seen to act in even the tightest close-up meant that 'there isn't another young dramatic actress in American films who can touch her'.

Having lost out for They Shoot Horses Don't They? to Maggie Smith in Ronald Neame's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), Fonda had an easier time as the sole American in a Best Actress category that was completed by Julie Christie for Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Glenda Jackson for John Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday, Vanessa Redgrave for Charles Jarrott's Mary, Queen of Scots and Janet Suzman for Franklin J. Schaffner's Nicholas and Alexandra. Having sent a Vietnam veteran to collect her Golden Globe, Fonda took her father's advice to stay humble and keep it brief at the Oscars. On being handed her award by Walter Matthau, Fonda thanked the Academy before leaving the stage with the words, 'There's a great deal to say and I'm not going to say it tonight,' With the aid of sign language, she was more forthright when she won again for Hal Ashby's anti-war drama, Coming Home (1978).