Clevercell Very disappointing...

AutCuddly Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Freeman This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Jon Corelis This justly famous film by Alan Pakula (The Parallax View, Sophie's Choice, All the President's men) ostensibly starring a very young Donald Sutherland as a small town cop turned private investigator who searches for a missing friend in big bad NYC would have qualified as a well-made but standard hard-boiled mystery if it were not for the stellar performance of Jane Fonda as the call girl whose help he enlists for his search, which lifts it into the category of a classic: rarely in film has a performance let us know a character so thoroughly. Advisory: drug use and language, scary but not too graphic violence, sex rather restrained by current standards.

poe-48833 For me, it's the cinematography by Gordon Willis that makes KLUTE a must-see movie- that, and the understated direction by Pakula; and the low-key performances by Fonda and Sutherland... The most interesting scene in the movie, I think, is the therapy session with Fonda and her shrink, in which Ms. Fonda makes clear just how blurry is the fine line between the world's oldest profession (politics) and the second oldest (prostitution). (That's not her intention, of course: it simply SOUNDS like such an attempt at such a delineation.) Sutherland is so laid back as to come across as nearly comatose: one gets the impression that it might take something as jarring as a claw hammer to the head to get a gut reaction out of him. A measured pace helps highlight Gordon Willis's superb cinematography, and that's a plus.

jimbo-53-186511 Six months after the disappearance of one of his employees boss Peter Cable (Charles Cloffi) hires a private investigator John Klute (Donald Sutherland) to investigate his disappearance. However, John's only links to the employees disappearance are some seedy letters and a call-girl Bree Daniel (Jane Fonda) who has a connection to the missing person.Klute is one of those films that does hook you in at the start (as indeed any good mystery film does), but sadly it's an example of a film where I found myself gradually losing more and more interest as it trundles along. The film is very poorly paced and simply isn't exciting, suspenseful or compelling enough to make it truly stand out from the crowd. The film is OK when it focuses on the mystery, but loses focus far too often with some unnecessary scenes - examples of this include Bree's psychiatry sessions and although they offer insight in to her as a person they also seem to focus on her feelings towards Klute. To me, it would have been better if more time would have been focused on the mystery at hand as opposed to their clichéd and contrived romance. I note that Jane Fonda won an Oscar here and whilst I don't mean to discredit her (I did think she was very good here), I couldn't help but feel that she perhaps stood out more here because of how poor everyone else was - Donald Sutherland was lifeless here and I'm unsure whether this is his fault or down to how the writers have asked him to portray his character, but either way he was dull. I wasn't expecting a crazy performance here, but I thought that there may have been a bit of a rapport or a bit of chemistry between Sutherland and Fonda, but it just wasn't there and it left the film feeling a bit flat and unfulfilled.As I've mentioned the mystery element is OK, but it isn't what I'd call compelling or edge of your seat, but it has just about enough going to make it worth watching (although I thought the final act was terrible). The only other really good thing about this film (other than Jane Fonda) was Michael Small's score which did help to create tension and suspense where the script was failing to deliver the same.Klute is a film that pretty much does everything right, but it always felt like it was doing it in a half-hearted way. Aside from Fonda's performance and Small's score everything else felt rather mediocre and distinctly average across the board.

blanche-2 Klute is part of Pakula's Paranoia Trilogy which includes the Parallax View and All the President's Men. Someone on this board compared Klute with The Devil's Own and said the latter was a bad film because Ford and Pitt didn't get along. I hope he was kidding. But you can read my review of that thing some other time.I saw Klute on TCM and will have to get it from Netflix and watch it again. It was so dark I could barely see a thing. And in reading the message board, there were scenes described I never saw due to losing my cable signal. So why review it - well, because it is an excellent film without what I missed, with a perfect performance by Jane Fonda.The plot concerns a private detective (Donald Sutherland) searching for a missing man who winds up working with a part-time call girl (Fonda).Pakula has the atmosphere down pat - dark, murky, low class, and seedy, filled with users and drug addicts. Bree is a fascinating character. Once a full-time call girl, she left the lucrative business after taking a terrible beating from a john. She is now an aspiring actress, using an Irish brogue for a Joan of Arc monologue, auditioning for commercials, etc. She takes hooking jobs because she needs the money. She likes the control she has when she's with paying customers. What she fears is a real, intimate, close relationship. Underneath the hard shell is a vulnerable woman afraid of the dark.Klute (Sutherland) rents an apartment in her building as part of his detective work. He tapes her encounters and follows her, finally approaching her to ask about the missing man, Grunemann. The two become lovers.Sutherland and Fonda give very natural performances, realistic and powerful ones. Both characters in a way have hard shells - Klute seems dispassionate, Bree can be abrasive and angry.There was suspense, but Klute succeeds more as a character study than as a thriller, in my opinion, and as the story of two people from two different worlds being drawn to one another, and what that means for the future.A disturbing film with a thought-provoking ending. I look forward to seeing it again, and let's hope I can make out more in the scenes the next time. For a film that took as long as three hours per day to set the lights, there isn't much.