***½/**** Image A Sound B
starring Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Charles Cioffi, Nathan George
screenplay by Andy and Dave Lewis
directed by Alan J. Pakula
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Unexplained phenomenon of the 1970s: the non-stardom of Alan J. Pakula. Despite having helmed three of the decade's quintessential films (Klute, The Parallax View, and All the President's Men) and possessing a style that remains to this day sui generis, his name means less than that of directors far more craven. Perhaps he was too old to be ranked with the Movie Brats (though that didn't stop Robert Altman), or worked on studio films that might have seemed conformist at the time, but for my money, nothing–not even the more fashionable Blow Out and The Conversation–captured the strangled sense of betrayal and claustrophobic helplessness of the post-Vietnam/Watergate era better than the films of my man Alan J.. And his Klute serves as a reminder of what a director does, taking the raw material of a script and contextualizing it so that its events ring as more than a self-contained adventure.
All of the pitfalls are there for the taking. Andy and Dave Lewis's script, while structurally unconventional, has a few built-in clichés that threaten to trivialize the subject matter. There is an indefatigable small-town detective, John Klute (Donald Sutherland), tracking down a missing friend; the only clue to his whereabouts comes from big-city prostitute Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda). As culture critic Fredric Jameson has pointed out, Bree is a collection of stereotypes about "frigid" prostitutes who "want attention and power over others and…are unable to face 'serious' relations." The dismantling of her impenetrability becomes a project for the quiet authority of Klute when he isn't chasing down witnesses marked for death. The stage is thus set for a conclusion in which his pursuit of the power behind the murders can dovetail with his conquest of Bree and crown him King Macho Man of the '70s.
But the film doesn't really belong to Klute. A better title would be "Bree," because it's her movie all the way–and not only because Jane Fonda walks all over the Milquetoast Donald Sutherland in the acting department. Pakula, sensing that despite her sketchy conception she's the most interesting character in the piece, apparently set out to visually demonstrate her plight, and deftly sketches the disappointment and frustration of his blocked and unhappy heroine. Her futile attempts to break into modelling are illustrated in a sequence where she's one face in a stream of auditions, and her sessions with her therapist are rendered in blunt master shots that unflinchingly record her squirmy denials and angry admissions. His intent gazing at Bree coaxes us away from the genre requirements, and if his aesthetic is a tad voyeuristic, making her a case for us instead of an anti-hero, it's also aware of where the action is and makes her seem more important than a done deal in just another cop movie.
Faced with the anguished spectacle of Bree, Pakula makes the conspiracy to kill her and other witnesses all the more repellent. Shrewdly, the director shifted attention from the agent of salvation to the object of hostilities, allowing us to count the cost of the executive culprit's desire to erase the alive and kicking prostitute as the worst sort of corporate power mongering. And Pakula's predilection for wide master shots–accompanied by the cold grip of DP Gordon Willis's neutral, steely palette–helps you feel the claustrophobic tension as her options dwindle and her environment itself seems alive with danger. Meanwhile, his fetishistic replaying of a key phone conversation, famously introduced in the opening credits, repeats how a casual exchange can be used against someone in the age of surveillance, intensifying the horror. Brilliantly, Pakula baffles the genre throughline with outside information and an object lesson in who suffers in lieu of accepting it as a world unto itself.
So here's to the late, lamented Alan J. Pakula, dead before the world could understand what his loss could mean, especially as the studios finally reined in his bizarre visuals and confined him to Scott Turow and John Grisham adaptations. But for one, brief shining moment, he had the stuff to make a crummy detective thriller sing with buried subtext. Klute is one of the most resonant and gripping genre films Hollywood ever produced.
THE DVD
by Bill Chambers Although Alan J. Pakula came from television, he was fond of the wider 'scope frame and knew what to do with it in the most TV-unfriendly of terms. A widescreen presentation is essential to Klute: the negative space in cinematographer Willis's compositions typically lost to panning-and-scanning is as vital to the film's visual language as are the grungy New York sets. The print used for the DVD master was digitally cleaned, resulting in a 2.42:1 anamorphic transfer of tremendous clarity, if unforgiving luminance (don't watch this in the daytime). Colour and contrast are also impeccable, while compression artifacts are minimal. As for the audio, the Dolby 2.0 mono sound has a consistently pleasant timbre. Extras include: an eight-minute non-synch-sound short from 1971–Klute in New York: A Background for Suspense–that plays like a hygiene short; cast/filmmaker "highlights" (filmographies); and the theatrical trailer, which is in good shape but nigh unwatchable.
114 minutes; R; 2.42:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 1.0, French DD 1.0; CC; English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Warner
