Klute (1971)
(On Cable TV, January 2020) If movies were our sole guide to the decades, it would be a wonder anyone made it out of the early 1970s without killing themselves out of sheer unadulterated depression. A good portion of 1970s movies are executed in a deathly serious tone, dark and merciless. Klute is certainly part of that era, both thematically and visually. The story of a Manhattan prostitute working with a private detective to catch a serial killer, Klute is a dour story executed in as visually dark a fashion as possible. It showed up on TCM as part of their cinematography showcase, and the introductory segment points out how the film deliberately obscures details that earlier films and lesser cinematographers would have exposed. But no: here we have the detective entering an unknown room, with only the light of his flashlight illuminating the scene. The rest of the film isn’t better, as it explores the inner life of a prostitute (played by none other than Jane Fonda, who got rewarded by an Academy Award for her atypical performance) against the backdrop of a lurking killer. Donald Sutherland (!) also leads as the eponymous Klute, drawn closer to a woman he wants to protect. Visually stylish and directed with gritty naturalism by Alan Pakula (anticipating some of his better-known conspiracy thrillers of the mid-1970s), Klute is perhaps best appreciated as another marker of the rapid evolution of American cinema after 1967—it’s not clear to me that the film, even with its clear affiliation with film noir, could have been made in the same way even five years earlier. At least Klute uses those then-new tools of cinema in the service of a genre story rather than a straight-up drama, ensuring that it remains worth a watch even if the all-consuming darkness of the early 1970s can become overbearing to modern viewers. Heaven knows we’ve seen much worse since then.