Klute
Nothing can beat the tagline: "One man is missing. Two girls lie dead. ...and someone breathing on the other end of the phone." This is perhaps the best stalker movie of all time.
Director Alan J. Pakula kicked off his "paranoia trilogy" with this 1971 thriller about a jaded call girl (Jane Fonda, who won an Oscar for her work) who works with a private investigator (Donald Sutherland) to catch a killer who's been targeting ladies of the evening. "Lots of guys swing with a call girl like Bree -- one guy just wants to kill her," cooed the poster, and that's pretty much Klute in a nutshell; there wasn't anything particularly innovative or unexpected about Andy and Dave Lewis' screenplay, and neither was Pakula's direction the film's main selling point (Roger Greenspun of the New York Times described it as "a tepid, rather tasteless mush").
Its real strength was the interplay between Sutherland and Fonda, both of whom drew raves from critics. Roger Ebert was one of the duly impressed, writing, "with Fonda and Sutherland, you have actors who understand and sympathize with their characters, and you have a vehicle worthy of that sort of intelligence. So the fact that the thriller stuff doesn't always work isn't so important."
Thursday, September 03, 2009
