Klute

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.