Klute

After showing Bullitt, Kevin decided to double down on the eponymous Woodstock-era procedural crime films with Alan J. Pakula‘s 1971 offering Klute.

It’s Jim Henson’s President Snow Babies!

Six months after the disappearance of Tom Gruneman, a rural Pennsylvania businessman, with the police having no particular leads, his wife and a fellow executive by the name of Cable at his company hire John Klute, a friend of the family (and a private eye with no missing persons experience) to try to break the case.  The available leads are very thin – about all they’ve got is an obscene letter found at the missing man’s work desk addressed to a New York City call girl.

Don’t worry, Jane.  Jennifer Aniston will bring it back.

That call girl goes by the name of Bree, and she’s currently trying (and failing) to get out of the world’s oldest profession and into acting.  She initially refuses to help Klute, seeing as the police have already gone over everything she knows pretty thoroughly, but she eventually accedes, largely because she feels she is being stalked, and what with the creeper on her roof and the harassing phone calls, she’s probably right.

You’re gonna need a bigger necklace

Still, she’s unable to identify Gruneman from a photo, and while she remembers being roughed up by a John a few years back, she doesn’t remember much else about him.  In search of answers, they visit Bree’s old pimp, who had set up the date with Abusive John, and he leads them on a seeming wild goose chase tracking down two former colleagues of Bree’s.  One, who was directly responsible for having the John (one of her regulars) assigned to Bree, has committed suicide in the meantime.  The other is drug-addled, and can do little more than tell them that the guy in question was definitely older than Gruneman.  Oh, and of course she ends up dead shortly thereafter.

Well, on Earth, when our psychocardiogram readings are in harmony and we wish to, make love, as you call it, we take an exultation transference pellant and remain, like this. Here, let me show you. For one minute or until full rapport is achieved.

In the meantime, Klute is starting to get some freebies – sorry, “in-kind contributions” – from Bree, and she spends a bunch of time telling her therapist that she’s conflicted about their relationship.  But finally, Klute gets a real break in the case due to forensic typography analysis of the letter addressed to Bree.  You would think that maybe the police would have, I dunno, already done this but the results are unambiguous: the letter was written by none other than Cable, who is ostensibly directing the whole investigation.

Gee, our old LaSalle ran great!  Those were the days!

Klute tries to honeypot Cable by telling him that he’s found somebody willing to sell him one of the deceased ladies’ little black books that would identify Abusive John thinking that he could entrap Cable by telling him when and where the ostensible meeting would happen.  Instead, Cable tracks down Bree, and before killing her, he explains his entire mastermind plan (TL;DW – Cable is in fact Abusive John, and Gruneman caught him with one of his dates, and he disposed of Gruneman knowing he would talk, then tried to pin the whole thing on Gruneman with the letter found at his desk), leaving Klute just enough time to show up and…well, he scared him into jumping backwards through a high-story window.  And Bree packs up her apartment and heads back to rural Pennsylvania with her new beau Klute.  The End.

I have to admit, my almost-favorite part of this movie was Bree’s invisible cat, until it finally appeared on screen.  For the first probably two thirds of the movie, Bree went through all of the motions of having a cat – putting down food, calling for it, etc. – yet the cat never showed up.  I was beginning to get a serious “The Crawling Hand” vibe, where a poor cat named Jackson was constantly being stepped on and yowling about it (“MEOOOOOW!”  “Sorry, Jackson!”) off camera but never seen.  I loved this so much that I actually named one of my cats after this invisible creature.  R.I.P., Jackson!  But then, just as I thought Pakula had done the same thing and invented a fictional cat, there’s Bree holding a cat.  Damn.

But honestly, outside of the acting, which is actually pretty good, I’m not convinced there’s much to offer from this film.  The sets and cinematography are bland, and the story is not only pretty boring, but seeing as we don’t really get introduced to any particular suspects by an hour and a half into the film, we know it pretty much has to be either Cable or the old pimp.  It’s time for the movie to be over and there’s literally nobody else.  And the old pimp isn’t a very good suspect because, I mean, he was identifiable!  Which would mean for it to be the pimp, all the prostitutes would have to be lying about the whole thing.  So it was always Cable.  And maybe the absolute worst part of his ever-so-cliché just-long-enough mastermind confession is that anybody who has ever seen a movie has figured the whole thing out long before, and is just nodding their head waiting for him to get on with killing the girl already.

Even the premise of the movie is a bit sketchy.  I kind of, I mean kind of, understand why Cable would want to hire an inexperienced Klute to investigate a crime Cable knows he committed.  Obviously with no missing persons experience, Klute is more likely than an expert to come up with nothing.  But on the other hand, because Gruneman was his friend Klute is personally invested, which makes the decision less logical.  And of course, with the police stymied, Cable is in great position to do nothing at all, at least as long as the wife isn’t pushing the issue.  So maybe the wife is pushing the issue.  But why in the world, once he sent Klute to investigate, did he start menacing Bree, pushing her into helping Klute due to fears of her own safety?  At that point, just wait for the whole thing to blow over.  Then you don’t really have to worry about the prostitute slowly developing a heart of gold and you get away with the whole thing.  I dunno.  I love Donald Sutherland, but no real plans to watch this one again.