Klute

Make it a double feature with Mildred Pierce and save!

Jane Fonda at the height of her fame, in the role that won her an Oscar; Donald Sutherland in one of his first major starring performances; the brilliant cinematographer Gordon Willis preparing to shoot The Godfather the following year: the prodigious director Alan J. Pakula (All the President’s Men) assembled a remarkable team of collaborators for this seamy underworld thriller about a small-town Pennsylvania PI (Sutherland) drawn into the web of intrigue and murder surrounding a glamorous New York call girl (Fonda). Bree, the hardened, thoroughly professional prostitute at the center of Klute, could be a kind of model for many of Haynes’s heroines (particularly the title character in Mildred Pierce), and the movie’s visions of a now-bygone New York prefigure the even older Manhattan cityscapes that fill Carol.