Klute (1971)

Klute arrives from 1971 with the musty authority of a neo-noir that has been allowed to age into respectability. Alan J. Pakula's film is chiefly remembered for Jane Fonda's Bree Daniels, a call girl with a nervous intelligence and a stubborn interior life. The screenplay gives her ambivalence about intimacy, work, and domesticity a real dramatic weight. Fonda's own feminist misgivings about the role are well documented, and the finished performance turns those misgivings into character rather than pamphlet. This is a proto-feminist study by instinct, not a modern ideological tract. Bree is three-dimensional because the film watches her think, not because it instructs us to admire her.

Elsewhere the film's social consciousness is thin and mostly incidental. The cast is white by default, with a Black police lieutenant appearing without comment and then receding into procedure. There is no LGBTQ material, no racial thesis, and no environmental argument, even though the villain runs a chemical company. That corporate respectability hiding violence offers a faint suspicion of boardroom power, not an economic polemic. Body positivity and neurodivergence are absent. Bree's sessions with her psychiatrist supply psychological texture and paranoia, not a social identity. The film prefers mood, surveillance, and the jangle of Michael Small's score to any sermon.

Klute is therefore a restrained vintage. It has a genuine female-centered pulse and a vague distrust of corporate men, but it never organizes those instincts into a lecture. The thriller machinery is uneven, and the mystery is solved by typography, which is either period charm or a warning about the limits of detective work. Fonda's performance and Pakula's oppressive city remain. The film earns its seriousness through atmosphere and behavior, not through messaging. We can respect it without pretending it belongs to a later cultural moment.