Klute
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Klute is a 1971 film which tells the story of a prostitute who assists a detective in solving a mystery. It stars Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Charles Cioffi, Dorothy Tristan, Vivian Nathan, and Roy Scheider. The movie was written by Andy Lewis and Dave Lewis and directed by Alan J. Pakula.
The film includes a cameo appearance by the famed Warhol Superstar actress Candy Darling in the disco scene, and another by future All in the Family costar Jean Stapleton. The original music score was composed by Michael Small. The film's tagline is: "Lots of guys swing with a call girl like Bree. One guy just wants to kill her."
Plot
A Pennsylvania chemical company executive, Tom Gruneman, disappears. The police find an obscene letter in Gruneman's office addressed to a New York City prostitute named Bree Daniels, who had received several such letters. After six months of fruitless police work, Peter Cable, a fellow executive at Gruneman's company, hires family friend and detective John Klute to investigate Gruneman's disappearance.
Klute rents an apartment in the basement of Bree's building, taps her phone, and follows her as she turns tricks. Bree appears to enjoy the freedom of freelancing as a call girl while auditioning for acting and modeling jobs, but she reveals the emptiness of her life to her psychiatrist. Bree refuses to answer Klute's questions at first. After learning that he has been watching her, Bree says she does not recognize Gruneman. She acknowledges being beaten by a john two years earlier, but cannot identify Gruneman from a photo. Bree takes Klute to meet her former pimp, Frank Ligourin, who managed Jane McKenna, a prostitute who referred the abusive client to Bree. McKenna has apparently committed suicide and their other colleague Arlyn Page has since become a drug addict and disappeared.
Klute and Bree develop a romance, although she tells her psychiatrist that she wishes she could go back to "just feeling numb" turning tricks. She tells Klute she is paranoid that she is being watched. They find Page, who tells them that the photo of Gruneman is not the client, who was an older man instead. Page's body is later found in the river. Klute connects the "suicides" of the two prostitutes, surmising that the client was using Gruneman's name. He also thinks the client killed Gruneman and might kill Bree next. Klute revisits Gruneman's acquaintances. By typographic comparison, the obscene letters are traced to Cable, to whom Klute has been reporting during his investigation. Klute asks Cable for money to buy the "black book" of McKenna's clients to learn the identity of the abusive client. He leaves enough bread crumbs to see whether Cable reveals his own complicity in the murders.
Cable follows Bree to a client's office and reveals that he sent her the letters. After Gruneman accidentally found him physically abusing McKenna, Cable was worried Gruneman would use the incident to sabotage his career. Cable tried to frame Gruneman by planting the letter in his office. After playing an audiotape he made as he murdered Page, he attacks Bree. When he sees Klute rush in, Cable abruptly lurches backward to get away, crashing through a window to his death.
Bree moves out of her apartment with Klute's help. A voiceover conversation with her psychiatrist reveals her hesitancy to give up her life of autonomy to be in a traditional relationship with Klute, saying she'd "go out of [her] mind" if she turned to a domestic lifestyle. She admits that although she will miss Klute, she is unable to tell him, and jokes that the doctor will likely see her again the next week. As they leave the apartment, Bree gets a telephone call from a client; she tells him she is leaving New York and does not expect to return. She and Klute leave the apartment together.
