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Klute (1971)

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From Time Out Film Guide

Fonda's Oscar-winning performance as New York call-girl Bree Daniels is the real focus of Pakula's thriller, rather than Sutherland's Klute, the private eye whose increasingly obsessional 'protection' she reluctantly receives when menaced by a former client. Though it's obviously valid to follow the line that Klute, with its abstracted updates of private eye and urban noir conventions, initiated Pakula's string of paranoid thrillers (The Parallax View, All the President's Men ), it's just as fruitful to see it as belonging to a trio of features (with Comes a Horseman and Rollover), each starring Fonda, that hinge on the contradictions of autonomy and emotional commitment facing would-be independent women. The threats of dependency and destruction here become Sutherland's investigator and Cioffi's telephone breather, and Pakula's open ambivalence about Bree's eventual 'fate' will be repeated in Fonda's dealings with Caan's war-hero/Western stranger and Kristofferson's Wall Street cowboy. For once, a genuinely psychological thriller.

Author: PT

Time Out Film Guide

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usman khawaja said...

Posted on Jul 23 2008 10:47 a womans dilemma
if moral ambiguity ever was questioned relevantly and then answered in a level headed manner, then klute will be one of the best movies to have portrayed it, as it takes prostitution ,illicit surveillance and murder in the evil milieu of a morally bankrupt metropolis and turns it inside out to find a relevant aspect to all the resident evil ,it triumphs with jane fonda as the liberated call girl but also donald sutherland as the stubborn investigator who is prepared to go to any length to redeem himself and find the truth ,fortunately the art of the writer and the performors is coherent and meets in an astonishing verisimilitude to create a timeless classic within an entertaining thriller ,a marvel of a movie with its dark ,languid ,lyrical narration which never sacrifices realism for comfort ,must see if only for the frustrating and totally real sex scene between fonda and sutherland which makes sex look like medication in a sick society.both a film noir and a social drama it works at every level with slick action and intimate emotional moments between the leads .

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