There’s one scene early on in the classic thriller “Klute” directed by Alan J. Pakula that has always fascinated me, and it may just be one of my favorite moments in movie history. We get a long shot of a street in New York City – and the camera lingers – as we watch the oncoming crowd move towards us. It becomes voyeuristic. The lens makes us willing accomplices, and we’re spying just like the possible stalker that detective John Klute is after. Then there’s the object of our attention – dead center on the screen is Bree Daniels walking in our direction. We observe her – we can almost read what she’s thinking. The shock is when you realize that’s Jane Fonda – and that the actress has erased herself and fully become this other person. A lot has been written and spoken about male actors who presaged a new kind of acting – think Brando and Dean. Fonda as Bree did something as revolutionary – a performance where there’s no vanity – she’s not interested in making you sympathize with her nor her character – she’s simply going deep into another human being and letting her be. The investment in character – her precision – and emotional grip on you the viewer is formidable.
“Klute” – a masterpiece released in 1971 – starts with the disappearance of Tom Gruneman – a business and family man from a suburban area in Pennsylvania. Six months have gone by, and the police’s investigation is growing cold – so the family hires close friend and detective John Klute to find him. The only piece of evidence is an obscene letter found in Gruneman’s desk and addressed to a high-end call girl – Bree Daniels – in New York City. Bree has also started to feel that someone is following her. She starts to understand that her life might be in jeopardy – and becomes heavily invested in the investigation – as well as emotionally attached to Klute. Both protagonists blur the line between the business and the personal.
The film is the first of what’s unofficially known as Pakula’s “Paranoia Trilogy” – which includes “The Parallax View” (1974) and concludes with “All The President’s Men” (1976.) The three films are not narratively connected – but they all share an atmosphere of restlessness and individuals that are caught in a web of corruption and conspiracy that is stifling. All three movies find the main characters embarking on a dangerous investigation.
Working with one of the greatest cinematographers, Gordon Willis, Pakula renders a mood that is visceral. Their composition emphasizes the negative space surrounding Bree. Like classic noir movies – there’s the exploitation of shadows and darkness. Most of the film is seen from the point of view of the killer – as he watches and follows Bree. We see her apartment through the skylight above her bed or from the street across her front door. There’s a constant sense of suspicion. It is terrific how the director manipulates the peeping-tom quality of cinema. Sounds – in particular the ringing of a telephone will chip away at our comfort level. From the opening credits the crucial role of tape recordings will be on display. It all chips away at our sense of comfort and privacy.
Bree Daniels is not your typical femme fatale – nor your archetypal prostitute. Pakula and Fonda do not pass judgement – they create a very complex character study of a woman that is trying to find a sense of order in a world that is unforgiving and dangerous. Fonda creates a delineated character full of contradictions, flaws, humor and so much humanity. She visits a therapist and discusses how she loves the control and manipulation of her rendezvous with men – yet she’s unable to control things outside of her transactions. It is with trepidation that she starts to let her guard down with Klute. I have to admit that in these days where there’s such a sense of alienation – and us being unable to govern our surroundings and what is happening around us – I found a lot of comfort being in the company of Bree Daniels.
Bree Daniels: “Inhibitions are always nice because they’re nice to overcome. Don’t be afraid. I’m not. As long as you don’t hurt me more than I like to be hurt. I will do anything you ask. You should never be ashamed of things like that. You mustn’t be. You know, there’s nothing wrong. Nothing is wrong. I think the only way that any of us can ever be happy is to let it all hang out. “
Love,
Roger
Available to stream on HBO Max and to rent on FandangoNOW, Microsoft, iTunes, Amazon Prime, Google Play, YouTube, Vudu and DIRECTV.
Written by Andy Lewis and David E. Lewis (as Dave Lewis)
Directed by Alan J. Pakula
Starring: Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Charles Cioffi, Roy Scheider
114 minutes
Co-Writer Andy Lewis on “Klute”
“It was written entirely on “spec.” As I’ve indicated, I swiped the topic, the female character, the environment, and the general course of the story from one different place or another. I did most of the actual scripting, but in the early stages there was a whole lot of back-and-forth between Dave and me of opinions, events, particulars of character and scene, and everything else. This went on mostly by letter and via phone – a prodigious amount as Dave was located in California and I in Massachusetts. I’d have trouble attributing any part of the original script to one or the other of us solely. The outcome was just as I’d hoped. Partly out of the elements I’ve listed and partly out of simple good luck, I had hit on a real audience appetite. My agents were greatly pleased. In effect, they put it up for auction. It sold literally overnight to Warner Bros. as it turned out. As I remember, from my first dealings at the time with Warner Bros., Alan had expressed an interest in the script as producer/director but was passed up. A little bit later, he reinserted himself in the proceedings and got locked into the project.”
“… ‘Klute’ was/is an artifact. A deliberate outcome. I wanted to get out of TV. I knew I had to write for the market. That almost automatically meant “thriller.” I put that together with Levy’s passing comment and with the gamine female character I spoke of before, and then, to complete my thievery, I pulled out a plot situation I remembered from years before – when I was literally a child – from an ancient Saturday Evening Post serialized story about a farmer/rancher-type who journeys to the big city to look at an empty yard where his brother was murdered long ago to figure out who actually did it. This is one of two resonant American themes (I’ll get to the other in a moment): the rube who turns the tables on the city slickers. There is an entire tradition – you may well be familiar with it – of the Toby Show. Toby is the rural duffer who turns out to be smarter than the slickers all around. (Klute, right?) The second theme is paranoia. I’m sure this afflicts people all over the world, but I somehow think of it as typically American. The hidden pattern of things. The darkness. The people out there watching you, plotting against you, waiting to hurt you. Sounds you hear at night. Silences on the phone. All that stuff. I figured I would write this thing, however it went, to take the fullest possible advantage of this – what should we call it? – instinct. Deliberately.” (thenextreel.com)
Lewis on Working with Director Alan J. Pakula
“In general, the result of Alan’s and my working-through (very thorough on both our parts; I liked his appetite for detail) was to narrow the focus on the Bree-Klute emotional relationship and to render it less thorough but somewhat harder edged than in the original. At every point, we aspired to preserve the paranoid atmosphere of events. More importantly, we wanted to preserve the sense (to a degree illusory) that we were offering the real “inside story” of high-class prostitution. Now these are changes that came about in the course of Alan’s and my efforts jointly. There remain changes that Alan subsequently made by himself without our consultation. Some were minor and within the usual course of things in the transition from script to the much more complex business of production. Examples: a scene in a grocery store becomes a scene at a fruit stand, inserted visuals, Cable and his helicopter, etc. Things like that. Alan also invented and added (and I believe wrote by himself) a scene during the search by Klute and Bree for her former and addicted call girl colleague. This scene offered a glimpse into a small, rundown brothel setting. I recall it to mind as the “Janie Dale” scene, if I have that right. Anyhow, I remember objecting to it when Alan first proffered it to me, but I was wrong and he was right.
More significantly, and distinctly part of Alan’s reworking from script to film, was his use of tape recording as a dramatic device. The first instance of tape recording, to be sure, occurred in Dave’s and my script – Klute bugs and tape records Bree’s phone conversations in order to get a handle on her. I guess this took Alan’s fancy as he extended the topic in the film version. We see that Cable tape records Klute himself in an office scene. This, in effect, discloses Cable as a possible suspect and occurs earlier in the story than I would have put it. But then – more importantly – Alan used it again in the final Cable-Bree scene where he has her captive…And this scene – apart from a smattering of my previous dialog – is entirely Alan’s invention…” (thenextreel.com)
Jane Fonda on Her Iconic Style in “Klute”
“…a lot of the clothes I wore were my own clothes. [Costume designer] Ann Roth replicated the [trench] coat she had made for me to wear tonight…those boots, the skirt, the sweater—they were all mine. The choker was mine; the purse was mine. It became kind of iconic. The hairdo was mine!” I actually think that “Klute,” from a fashion point of view, is the most iconic film I’ve done. You can see there’s been a resurgence of the fashion [with] Klute-like clothes…“Barbarella” is more of a cult film, it’s hard to wear those costumes. They’re all in a museum outside of Rome.” (elle.com)
About Director Alan J. Pakula
“…Pakula was born in 1928 in the Bronx, New York, his father the co-owner of a printing business. It was the months between high school and college that altered his life – he worked at the Leland Hayward Theatrical Agency and fell in love with show business. He both wrote and acted in college plays, and after graduating from Yale Drama School joined Warner Bros cartoon department as an assistant animator, in 1949. He moved to MGM in 1950 as an apprentice, and while there worked with the writer-director Don Hartman on the musical “Mr Imperium.” The following year, when Hartman was made head of production at Paramount, he took Pakula with him as an assistant. Pakula became a producer in 1957 with a harrowing biographical film about the baseball player Jimmy Piersall’s battle with manic depression, “Fear Strikes Out.” Starring Anthony Perkins in his first leading role, the film was directed by Robert Mulligan and began a long collaboration between him and Pakula. The pair formed their own production company, and among the films produced by Pakula and directed by Mulligan were the Oscar-nominated “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962), starring Gregory Peck, the Steve McQueen-Natalie Wood romance “Love with the Proper Stranger” (1963), “Inside Daisy Clover” (1965) and “Up the Down Staircase” (1967).
Pakula became a director himself in 1969 with “The Sterile Cuckoo,” an offbeat teenage love story which won an Oscar nomination for its star Liza Minnelli in her first top-billed role. Pakula also produced the film and his next, the one which established him as a major director, “Klute” (1971), the story of an uneasy alliance between a private detective and a prostitute helping him to solve a murder…A hit with both critics and customers, the film made over $6m and won Fonda the New York Film Critics Award as Best Actress as well as the Oscar. She worked with Pakula twice more, in “Comes a Horseman” (1978), with James Caan and Jason Robards, and Rollover (1981), a complicated tale of financial wheeling and dealing that was one of Pakula’s failures. Maggie Smith starred in “Love and Pain” and the “Whole Damn Thing” (1972), another study of an offbeat attraction, this time between two introverts who meet on a tour of Spain. “The Parallax View” (1974) was a gripping tale of a reporter (Warren Beatty) investigating a political assassination, too pessimistic perhaps to be a big commercial hit but totally engrossing, exquisitely photographed and designed by the team who would work on Pakula’s subsequent film and greatest success, “All the President’s Men” (1976)…He received the New York Film Critics Award as Best Director for his work on the film, plus an Oscar nomination. “I was called the paranoid’s director,” said Pakula. “Funnily enough, I never expected to direct those kinds of films, although I was always interested in the body politic.”
…”Sophie’s Choice” (1982) won him an Oscar for his screenplay as well as Meryl Streep’s award, and “Orphans” (1987) showcased terrific performances by its three leads, Albert Finney, Kevin Anderson and Matthew Modine. The tall, bearded and somewhat professorial Pakula was, not without cause, frequently referred to as an “actor’s director”. “He was incredibly supportive and would give you the courage you needed,” said Candice Bergen, who starred in Pakula’s 1979 comedy “Starting Over.” “He made it safe for me to make a total fool of myself.” Pakula himself confessed his interest in psychology. “A man who is in control, and inside there is a frightened child – that interests me. Why? You can draw your own conclusions.” Pakula’s first wife was the actress Hope Lange, whom he married in 1963 and divorced in 1969. In 1973 he married a writer of historical novels, Hannah Cohn Boorstin. His film “See You in the Morning” (1979), which he also wrote and co-produced, is considered partly autobiographical, concerning a divorced man who marries a widow with several children. Boorstin had five children by her first husband when she married Pakula. The director achieved a return to mainstream success with his 1990 legal thriller “Presumed Innocent,” starring Harrison Ford…“The Pelican Brief” (1993), another conspiracy-theory tale about a law student (Julia Roberts) who uncovers the truth about the murder of two Supreme Court judges, found the director occasionally allowing the pace to slacken but otherwise back on form. Roberts was another performer who had praise for Pakula: “He would allow you your time and the freedom to find things in the material.” Pakula himself said: “I think, when you do a film, there’s a part of you in each character, or vice versa.” At the time of his death in a freak car accident, he was working on the screenplay for his next film, “No Ordinary Time,” about the Roosevelt administration.” (independent.co.uk)