Trailer
Plot summary
Tom Gruneman, an executive at a Pennsylvania chemical company, has been missing for six months. In his office the police find an obscene letter sent to Bree Daniels, a New York City call girl who has received several more. Peter Cable, a fellow executive and a family friend, hires John Klute, a detective with no experience in missing persons work, to investigate. Klute takes a basement apartment in Bree's building, taps her telephone and follows her as she works. Bree does not recognize Gruneman's photograph. She tells Klute about a client who beat her two years earlier, and takes him to Frank Ligourin, a former pimp who managed other women she knew. Bree also reports strange telephone calls.
Cast
- Morris Strassbergas Mr. Goldfarb
- Barry Snideras Berger
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Klute (1971)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Jane Fonda's casting was announced in April 1970, when she was under heavy scrutiny for her activism against the Vietnam War; to prepare she spent a week in New York City observing high-class call girls and madams, and went with them to after-hours clubs.
- Fonda had doubts about whether she could portray the role at all and asked Alan Pakula to release her from her contract and hire Faye Dunaway instead, but Pakula refused to let her go.
- To overcome her doubts, Fonda turned to her memories of several call girls she had known while living in France, all of whom worked for the famed Madame Claude and all of whom had been sexually abused as children, using that as a way into Bree's motivations.
- Andy Lewis, a writer who had primarily worked in television, drew his initial inspiration for the screenplay from a serial story he had read as a child in The Saturday Evening Post, about a man from the country who ventures into the city to solve his brother's murder.
