Klute
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- This article is about the film. For other uses, see Klute (disambiguation).
Klute is a 1971 film which tells the story of a prostitute who assists a detective in solving a murder mystery. It stars Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Charles Cioffi, Dorothy Tristan, Vivian Nathan, and Roy Scheider. The movie was written by Andy Lewis and Dave Lewis and directed by Alan J. Pakula.
Tagline: Lots of guys swing with a call girl like Bree. One guy just wants to kill her.
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Plot summary
The film begins with the disappearance of a Pennsylvania corporate executive named Tom Gruneman (briefly seen in the opening sequence), whose family hires a friend, police officer John Klute (Sutherland) to act as a private investigator and to look for him. A typewritten, obscene letter found in Gruneman's desk leads Klute to his only lead, Bree Daniels (Fonda), a call girl living in New York City to whom the letter was addressed. The relatively provincial Klute becomes drawn into Bree's seedy world, discovers that several of Bree's fellow call girls have been murdered by a homicidal "john", and that she herself was nearly killed by the same man—presumably Gruneman. After an uneasy start, the two work together to track down the killer. Along the way, Klute, the small-town cop, and Bree, the cynical city-slicker, develop an unlikely romance as he becomes protective of her and offers her a kind of genuine affection which she is completely unaccustomed to.
Awards
It won the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Jane Fonda), and was nominated for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Based on Factual Material or Material Not Previously Published or Produced.
Trivia
- According to her autobiography, Jane Fonda hung out with call girls and pimps for a week before beginning this film in order to prepare for her role. When none of the pimps offered to "represent" her, she became convinced she wasn't desirable enough to play a prostitute and urged the director to replace her with her friend Faye Dunaway.
- Barbra Streisand turned down the role of Bree Daniels, which then won Jane Fonda an Academy Award.