America was still numb from a decade of high level assassinations, confronting protests about its own order, a futile foreign war that increasingly verged on the criminal and, a few ad breaks away, even corruption at the highest level with Watergate. The rot at the top in this story is more of a background. We learn who the perp is about halfway through. What we are witnessing on that score is the actions of corporate monsters, schoolboys with the power of pharaohs, grinding their way through anyone below who might provide some nervous relief. Increasingly, we care about the slow and difficult negotiation between Klute and Bree. The expected whodunnit tale has already been binned and there's no clear suggestion that the pair are destined to cohere. We want them to but also might settle for the respect Klute affords Bree who has known so little (as her therapy sessions attest). There is a clear sense that their union might just give us some hope in such a compromised realm.
The two leads got a lot from their roles. Neither was strictly a breakthrough but both were significant in the career timelines. Fonda was plagued by a mix of anodyne roles (the one before this is an exception; look it up) and a nation that didn't want to forgive her for being outspoken and inconveniently political. This role landed her an Oscar which in the USA , for better or for worse, allows enough cache for an actor to start making the movies they want. Sutherland broke free of a trio of roles that might have typecast him in weirdo parts for the balance of his hours (recent examples are Jeremy Davies and Paul Dano). Both enjoyed a very distinguished 1970s and more.
Sutherland, like Fonda, is playing firmly against his recent past by giving us a sober and straight minded figure, someone who needs to meet the chaos of these shadows with strength. Some might find his performance too sober, perhaps even wooden but the only way he was going to meet Fonda on her terms was to step back. He plays it nuanced, allowing silences and sparse expression to tell his thoughts. And then when he must break into violence it is with a surprisingly free physicality which both shocks and relieves us.
But this is Fonda's film. At first, she comes across as a displaced middle class slummer whose diction and vowels don't match her character and this gives an impression that the actor herself is slumming. However, there's a crucial scene that addresses this and does so with plaeasing obliqueness. Bree auditions for the part of Joan of Arc in GB Shaw's Saint Joan. She chooses an Irish accent which is called "interesting" by the director. She is not going to get the part. Fonda is playing Bree as angry, regardless of her origins, and it is an anger built of others' cruelty, subjugation and hatred. What she is left with is a means of expression which is strong and impeccable, it might sound middle class but there is no mistaking her testimony. Bree has made the choice; it is another panel of her armour.
Outside of that hers is a constantly physical performance. Almost all of this has to do with the currency of physical intimacy in light of her trade and how it differs beyond it. Her problem is with how others perceive and misconceive this. She must be constantly alert of what a caress or a hug might mean, what value they might preesage on the part of the other. She lets us see how loaded human contact is to her. This is less anger than a survivalist's constant alertness. The warmth of her clear personal strength allows us to make it through most of her scenes where the idea of touch or avoiding it unsettles us. It is a solidly committed performance made from corageous decisions.
One element I self-shamingly omit from these blogs on movies is the score. I won't be able to pass it by this time as it's such an important one, even though it is made of a lot of brief visiits rather than carpeting scenes from top to toe. Michael Small provides a tinkling shiver without bass registers, tiny clouds of whispering doubt. I hate comparisons but the closest cousin I can think of for this is the unhelpful suggestion of a much more obscure film, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage which blends a late '60s sweetness with a spinechilling range of scrapes, glissandi, musique concrete and so on to give us a realm like this one where the danger could lie in a passing whim or distant whisper (an atypical Morricone electronic score). Small went on to create one of the finest film scores ever for the same director's The Parallax View, combining an unsettling mix of patriotic hymn and horror movie dissonance. This almost feels like a first draft of that.
Klute is the first of the informally titled paranoia trilogy by director Alan J. Pakula. While distinct from each other this, The Parallax View and All the President's Men yet share a sense of malaise, the feel of a physical trouble we let in through an inability to recognise it, painted in dank brown hallways, sterile privilege, flat corporate aesthetics and the public dressing of order in the red white and blue. This in other hands might have fallen to blunt satire or clinking allegory but these films don't. Down there in a Manhattan plagued by sleaze, a D.C. roped by conspiracy and a whole country being hollowed by complacency. In the wake of these the modified political thriller took form for the decade of New Hollywood as the discreet lighting of boardrooms and the dripping pipes of alleyways took over as the locations for the exchange and complication of power. To look at these films again in their middle age is to enjoy the pleasure of their gravity and to miss the same in mainstream films of the twenty-firwst century. This is not to say that cinema has lost its power (that hasn't changed) but perhaps could do with the kind of comittment that allowed the scary figure in Klute to begin his confession with: "I've no idea what I'm going to do. I'm so deeply puzzled." When the serpent is this freely whimsical you need to run. That's what I miss.
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