non-romance, romance, #12: Klute (1971, dir. Alan J. Pakula)
you're not going to get hung up on me, are you?
This is a non-romance, romance, which is a monthly paid subscription feature where I write about something other than strictly romance novels through the lens of romance. I’ve written one before about another Alan J. Pakula movie, All the President’s Men. This one is about Klute and sex work and police in romance.
I started law school in fall 2018, started working at a law school in winter 2022, and my younger sister, who I live with, started law school in fall 2022. I like to point this out to my students, as if to say: what you are experiencing, I’ve been experiencing, myself or by proxy, for six years. Perpetually surrounded by lawyers in the act of becoming. How grotesque.
My sister’s starting to think about her bar exam in July 2025, so we’ve been watching Law and Order. I’ve had multiple professors tell me at different points that students who went to law school because they loved Law and Order would then sometimes have trouble watching it afterwards, for all the moments that procedure collapses, or when court room antics become unrealistic. I did not go to law school because I love Law and Order,1 but if anything, I started watching it more while in law school.
Law school is also when I starting defining most my politics around prison abolition. Dick Wolf’s universe is certainly a pervasive example of copaganda, where police officers and prosecutors are unabashed heroes and we’re supposed to be disappointed when defendants manage to get away with anything other than a trial-by-jury conviction and maximum punishment sentence. But at some point during law school, I just switched how I was watching these procedurals. Annoyingly, I spend most of each hour pointing out criminal procedure and evidentiary problems that could be used in efforts to suppress evidence or be grounds for appeal. Which is a good way to study for the bar exam. Basically when we watch, the overzealous cops, who always seem aggrieved that they might need to get a warrant or that a suspect might have civil liberties, are pretty easy to cast as the villains who need to be course corrected and the prosecutors who find a way to convict anyway are the disappointing system works as it was designed.2 With a nod to civil liberties, but rest assured “bad” people are going away for a long time.
Cops are pretty frequent heroes in romance novels, though I definitely don’t seek them out. Unless I was working on a massive critique of the genre, I can’t imagine reading one where a 21st century, American cop was a romance main character, though I’ve read a dozen or so Bow-Street Runner3 novels. I enjoy very few of these for the same reason I dislike most Newgate Prison set novels: authors tends to project commentary about modern policing and prisons onto systems that don’t work as a one to one stand-in. Bow-Street Runners, historically, focused almost exclusively on property crime investigations, during a time when many property crimes were met with capital punishment. Having a BSR hero investigate a servant for stealing jewelry and then sending them to the gallows is not so far afield from some romance plots, but I imagine (and would hope) it would alienate some readers.
In the novels, Runners are must more likely to be investigating violent crime and have the subjects of their investigations be a less sympathetic noble person. Occasionally an author will acknowledge the specter of the horrors of a 19th-century prison, or reference the fact that primarily poor people will be subjected to imprisonment there. But many historical cop romances remain disinterested in this reality and even those to do directly engage with it, often have a “back then” sense, as in “back then, it was terrible,” as if modern incarceration is somehow more dignified or justifiable.4
So generally my rule for leisure reading is “no cops as romance heroes.” Reformed Rakes did do one episode on Jeannie Lin’s The Jade Temptress, where the hero is a constable during the Tang Dynasty in China (618 to 907 CE). Lin’s historical research into this setting not often taken up by historical romance is acute and Constable Wu Kaifeng’s role is more one of a working-class heavy, whose loyalties are stretched between who is paying him and the truth. Lin does not project modern American police righteousness or commentary onto his role and [spoilers] by the end of the book, he isn’t in law enforcement anymore.
During that episode, I think I say “everyone should watch Klute” at least three times. The heroine of The Jade Temptress is Mingyu, a courtesan, and she is inextricably linked to many of the characters involved in the murder investigation that Kaifeng is conducting, which is not a dissimilar plot to Alan J. Pakula’s 1974 film Klute, starring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland. I often think about Klute when I read romance, especially romances that have a sex worker heroine. I ended my review of my most disappointing read of the year, The Mistress Experience,5 with a suggestion to just watch Klute instead. So here’s me telling you watch Klute, a movie with a detective character and a condemnation of systems of policing, like it is a romance novel
the greatest actress in the world
In Klute, John Klute (Donald Sutherland, hottie) is investigating the disappearance of his friend, Tom Gruneman. Klute works as a police officer in a smalltown in Pennsylvania, but he has been hired as a private detective when he goes to New York to follow the leads. In Gruneman’s desk at work, police find drafted obscene letters to a call girl, Bree Daniels, in the city. Sometime during the first six months of his disappearance, Bree (Jane Fonda, hottie) is picked up by police on a prostitution charge and spends two months in jail for it, but she can’t really remember ever meeting Gruneman, though she does remember a John who almost killed her right around the time she was supposed to met Gruneman, so she seemed to be a dead end.
But she is where Klute starts. We, and Klute, see Bree working a lot in the film. She is in the processing of trying to go legitimate, struggling to find work as a model and an actress, but as she discloses to her therapist, she keeps falling back into old habits, taking dates when they present themselves, or calling a madam to set up a quick arrangement. And Bree is good at her job. Fonda walks a knife’s edge between humor and pain as Bree upsells her clients, takes on personas to please them, and expresses how much more powerful she feels in this interactions than at anonymous casting calls.
When Bree and Klute meet, he responds to her efforts of seduction with deadpan pivots back to the questions at hand (where is Tom Gruneman?). Fonda’s performance in these early scenes reminds me the most of Mary Astor as Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon, where she will say anything for 10 seconds to see what moves Humphey Bogart’s Sam Spade an inch in the direction of doing what she needs him to do. She’ll be plaintive and pleading one moment, furious the next, and at any moment prepared to seduce.
Unlike Sam Spade who is always trying to stay ahead of Brigid, Klute mostly responds to Bree’s different tactics with silence and Donald Sutherland’s big, blue mournful eyes. The investigation takes Bree back into a world that she has been trying to leave, meeting back up with her former pimp, Frank (Roy Scheider) and another woman, Arlen Page, who worked for Frank who was also threatened by the same violent John. Klute’s theory of Gruneman’s disappearance is scant and initially confused, but combined with Bree’s well-founded paranoia, he believes that the danger she is in is connected to Gruneman—whether he is the one following her or the person who is also hurt Tom.
When Klute and Bree finally sleep together, seemingly out of earnest feelings on his part, she takes it a triumphant proof that he is less virtuous than he pretends to be. But more than anything, Klute shows up for Bree, not proving his virtue by reticence to be with her, but through his willingness to be present either way. When she returns to Frank after a harrowing run in with Arlen, Bree dances dead-eyed in a club and then returns to her apartment, drug-sick. Klute tidies her apartment and sits on her bed with her, holding her so she doesn’t hurt herself. In the next scene, Bree dicloses to her therapist in voiceover her anxieties about giving up all the control in a relationship. But during the VO, we see Sutherland’s giant hand caresses Fonda’s face, shot in silhouette. In a movie where Bree is in either in a situation with a mask (her work, her acting, her seductions) or in danger, Klute is tender in her vulnerability, providing safety without distance.
The other scene that makes me sick with romance comes shortly after. Klute and Bree are shopping in an open air market. She palms a plum into her bag as he looks at other fruit and he quietly asks her what is in her bag. At this point, we know that he is asking her neutrally, without accusation. He proceeds to pick out the fruit as Bree looks at him, mostly in charmed disbelief. Most the scene happens through gesture: Bree leaning against Klute’s back, him pivoting around her to keep himself closer to her anyone else. My favorite bit in the whole movie is pictured below: Bree grabs the hem of Klute’s jacket. His hands are full of their groceries, but in the next shot he maneuvers the bags into his left arm so he can embrace her as they walk.
The minute domesticity is shattered in the next scene when they return to Bree’s apartment and its been broken into, her clothes torn up and violated. This intrusion allows Klute to gain more evidence about the disappearance of Gruneman, but pushes Bree to reject Klute and return once again to Frank. In a confrontation, Klute fights Frank and Bree injures Klute, seeming to her to drive him away. When Bree leaves her apartment, she considers going to Klute’s flat, but seems embarrassed and ashamed about her action, instead looking for another person to stay with.
But as she wanders the city, looking for a place of safety, we see relationships she has relied on falter, not because these people don’t care about Bree, but because there is a transactional element to them. First she tries to go to her therapist’s office, but it is closing for the night and then she tries to go to a regular client, but by the time she arrives, he has left his business, leaving her only cash with his secretary. Being alone puts Bree in danger, with her stalker finally catching up with her. Klute, on the other hand, using his surveillance and detective skills to find her before she is injured or killed, once again return to her, unconditionally.
The movie ends much more ambiguously than a romance novel would tolerate. There’s a gap between Bree’s internal thoughts, given once again in voiceover to her therapist, and her actions that we witness as she and Klute leave her apartment. She takes a client call as they are about to leave and turns him down, instead leaving with Klute. But in the voiceover she says:
I have no idea what's going to happen. I... I just can't stay in this city, you know? Maybe I'll come back. You'll probably see me next week.
I said in my review of The Mistress Experience that I don’t need every story that involves a sex worker to be one where she is in acute danger. I think salaciously depicting the dangers of sex work could be as flattening a method as rompy Regency-set attempts to equate sex work with sexual freedom of bourgeois women (the plots where a courtesan is actually a lady in disguise, and there’s some element in her bearing that reveals or hints that, of course, she innately has something in her that sets her apart from that profession. This happens a lot).
But when an act is criminalized, that act becomes more dangerous. Klute gestures to the corruption of the police when Frank, the pimp, says offhandedly to Klute that he might hold more weight with the police himself that Klute does, when the detective attempts to threaten an investigation into Frank’s dealings when he stonewalls Klute’s investigation. The danger that haunts Bree and her friends comes from clients, their bosses, and police.
One of the most harrowing bits of sound design in Alan J. Pakula’s filmography comes in a scene when Klute takes Bree down to a police station to look through a rolodex of Polaroids of Jane Doe bodies when they are still looking for Arlen Page. Klute stands behind Bree is silence as she flips through the cards, with deafening thuds as she turns the cards. None of the women are Arlen. But Arlen, or Bree, could be any of them. Anonymous bodies that have gone unidentified and uninvestigated.
Klute is adjacent to systems and people who would look past or down at Bree, but consistently chooses Bree over any loyalty he has to being a police officer in smalltown Pennsylvania or even the people who are paying him to investigate the disappearance of Gruneman. The romance here comes from Klute choosing to exist outside the systems that Bree is used to abandoning her. There’s no third act break-up where he says something cruel about her work or her tendency to turn away from him that he then has to apologize for; a standard romance novel would have a big betrayal to make the unambiguous HEA feel earned or deserved. Even if the couple’s end is left ambiguous, Klute’s steadiness is not.
recommendations
Revolting Prostitutes by Molly Smith and Juno Mac: I recommend this book to anyone interested in the politics of decimalization of sex work. Sex work decrim was a major entry for me into abolition politics!
A Gentleman Undone by Cecelia Grant, The Duke by Gaelen Foley, The Jade Temptress by Jeannie Lin: My two favorite sex worker heroine romances.
Don’t Look Now dir. Nicholas Roeg is my other favorite Donald Sutherland movie. It’s probably the scariest movie I love a lot.
I’ve argued that two of three movies in Pakula’s “Paranoia Trilogy” are romances. I don’t think The Parallax View (1974) is, but it is still a great movie!
Why I went to law school is a secret that I’ll tell anyone, but we have to have two martinis first.
I also find that early seasons of the original Law and Order (let’s say, the first decade), the show itself takes a much more nuanced view of what is the purpose of policing. Not that it isn’t copaganda, but those seasons compared to Law and Order: SVU which has almost an operatic dedication to telling me the worst cops in the world are actually Very Good at Their Jobs, are less overt/show more foibles in the police characters. NYPD Blue is better than any of these though (but less good for studying for the bar).
Bow-Street Runners were a private police force, subsidized by the state, in the 18th and early 19th centuries. They were an ancestor to the modern Metropolitan Police in London.
In my Newgate project, I explore how modern incarceration is different, but not a linear progression of humaneness. Foucault and all that, you know.
One major frustration I had with The Mistress Experience was how little we saw of the heroine’s labor as a sex worker. Thaïs Magdalene has auctioned off a “mistress experience” for charity and the hero has purchased her time. Thaïs usually only sleeps with any given client once, so this is quite the boon. But Lord Eden has purchased this experience because he is bad at sex and anxious about being a good lover to a future wife. Rather than adapt to his needs, Thaïs sends most of the book making ribald jokes at his expense until they fall in love and the relationship pretty seamlessly moves from worker-client to lovers—the hiccups come from “anxiety” about “society” and it’s perception of their relationship.