klute

Director: alan j. pakula

Actor: jane fonda,donald sutherland,charles cioffi,roy scheider

Data Published: Fri Jun 25 1971

Genres: Crime,Mystery,Thriller

Key Words: private detective,call girl,prostitute,private investigator,neo noir

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067309/

WIKI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klute

Description: Klute is a movie starring Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, and Charles Cioffi. A small-town detective searching for a missing man has only one lead: a connection with a New York prostitute.

Plot: A Pennsylvania chemical company executive, Tom Gruneman, has disappeared. The police reveal that an obscene letter was found in Gruneman's office, addressed to a prostitute in New York City named Bree Daniels, who had received several similar letters. After six months of fruitless police work, Peter Cable, a fellow executive at Gruneman's company, hires family friend and detective John Klute to investigate Gruneman's disappearance. Klute rents an apartment in the basement of Daniels' building, taps her phone, and follows her as she turns tricks. Daniels appears to be liberated by the freedom of freelancing as a call girl while trying to get into acting and modelling, but in a series of visits to her psychiatrist, she reveals the emptiness of her life. Daniels refuses to answer Klute's questions at first. After learning that he has been watching her, Daniels says she does not recognize Gruneman. She acknowledges being beaten by a john two years earlier, but cannot identify Gruneman from a photo. Daniels takes Klute to meet her former pimp, Frank Ligourin, whose fellow prostitute Jane McKenna passed the abusive client on to Bree. McKenna has apparently committed suicide, and their other colleague Arlyn Page became a drug addict and has disappeared. Klute and Daniels develop a romance, though she tells her psychiatrist that she wishes she could go back to "just feeling numb". She admits to Klute a deep paranoia that she is being watched. They find Page, who tells them the customer was not Gruneman based on the photo but an older man. Page's body subsequently turns up in the river. Klute connects the "suicides" of the two prostitutes, surmising that the client was using Gruneman's name and probably also killed Gruneman and might kill Daniels next. He revisits Gruneman's acquaintances. By typographic comparison, the obscene letters are traced to Cable, to whom Klute has been reporting on his investigation. Klute asks Cable for an additional $500 to buy the "black book" of clients of Bree, telling Cable he is certain it will reveal the identity of the abusive client. Cable corners Bree and reveals that he sent her the letters, explaining that Gruneman had interrupted him when he was with Bree and seen what they were doing. Believing that Gruneman would use the incident as leverage against him within the company, Cable attempted to frame Gruneman by planting the letter in his office. Cable follows Bree and traps her and then confesses to the killings. After playing an audiotape he made as he murdered Page, he attacks Daniels. Klute rushes in, and Cable jumps or is thrown out a window to his death (the conclusion is ambiguous). Daniels moves out of her apartment with Klute's help, though her voiceover with her psychiatrist reveals her fear of being able to adapt to domestic life and the likelihood that the doctor will "see me next week".