You could forget that the movie is named after him. In Alan J. Pakula’s Klute, Donald Sutherland, who died today at the age of 88, plays John Klute, a straight-arrow Pennsylvania police detective who goes to ‘70s New York in search of his best friend, a family man, businessman, another straight arrow, who’s gone missing and who may have something to do with the death of a Manhattan prostitute. His best lead, and—to their mutual surprise—his eventual lover is a call girl played by Jane Fonda who’s getting obscene letters and being stalked by someone who may be Klute’s missing friend.
It's easy to see why you can forget who the title refers to. As Bree Daniels, Jane Fonda gives one of the greatest performances ever put on film, a benchmark in the tough-headed, naturalistic style that has long defined the best American screen acting. What Fonda accomplishes is one of those weird bits of alchemy, like Bette Davis in The Letter, where she is fully immersed in her character without dimming or hiding the particular quality that makes her a star.
Bree is a heroine as hardboiled as the movie she’s in. What’s remarkable—and what makes the movie not just Fonda’s but Sutherland’s--is that this sophisticated, brittle New York call girl finds herself unable to intimidate the man she’s ready to dismiss as some Hicksville flatfoot. There’s no swagger in Sutherland’s Klute, there’s barely any anger, and no calculation. Everything he says, every physical movement is as considered as the piece of asparagus he briefly examines before eating in the Thanksgiving dinner that opens the movie.
What makes John Klute imposing is that he’s a man who knows so exactly who he is that he can’t be embarrassed or shamed by it. Bree tries, playing up her New York smarts, waiting for him to be shocked or judgmental when his investigation takes them into some sordid scene. She even gets him to sleep with her (before they fall in love), not because she desires him but for the sheer pleasure of showing him he can be had. The cliché of cop-and-call-girl romances is that the characters are from two sides of the same seamy world. Bree and Klute really are from two different worlds, and nothing Bree does can make Klute see his world, or himself, as phony. When, about halfway through the film, it appears as if his investigation is over and he’s heading back, Bree taunts him, asking if the big city got to him, the sin, the glitter, the wickedness. “All that’s so pathetic,” he answers, and she’s the one who’s shamed.
The moment wouldn’t work, and we wouldn’t feel anything for Klute, if Sutherland delivered that line as a condemnation. The reason it works is the pained empathy of Sutherland’s line reading. There is much of the human experience that’s alien to John Klute, but he never treats any of what’s alien to him as if it wasn’t human.
Sutherland, lanky, clean-shaven, and raw-boned makes Klute’s physical uprightness the outward manifestation of his inner uprightness. And Klute isn’t sexless, as Gary Cooper was made to be in his good-guy roles. Sutherland does something very difficult here—he makes goodness not just appealing but charismatic.
You can see that ability in other roles throughout his career. As the grieving father in Nicolas Roeg’s horror mosaic Don’t Look Now (the wail of anguish as he holds his drowned little daughter’s body in the opening scene is something, once experienced, that you take with you to your grave); as the prosperous New York art dealer in Six Degrees of Separation; and especially as the father mourning one son while attempting to save another, one of the few emotionally real things amidst the neat thesis-moviemaking of Ordinary People. What all these characters share is that they are experiencing something completely new to them, navigating wholly new vistas of what it means to be human while never sacrificing or doubting their own humanity.
As much as we claim to want good upright heroes, goodness in the movies can be a drag, usually because the actors playing those characters who are meant to be good turn that goodness into a Sunday school lesson. One of the great pleasures of watching Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca or as Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep is having a hero, a real hero, who, because of his wisecracking, irony, and disdain for sentimentality, doesn’t turn into a sap. (You could say the same about the Army surgeons Sutherland and Elliott Gould played in M*A*S*H.) Sutherland was Canadian but it doesn’t take much to imagine the tall, rangy John Klute transplanted to an American western. This was the type of movie hero who, in 1971 when Klute came out, had he appeared in a movie about the American past, audiences would likely have found they could no longer believe in. Sutherland and Fonda were lovers when the film was being made and he became drawn into her activism against the war in Vietnam. No one in that era, no matter what side they were on, could imagine that fifty years later the fight would not just be for what type of republic America was going to be but for whether it was going to be a republic at all. And while the self-hatred of the Vietnam years, the cheap and easy belief that America was just a land of baby killers (as long as the babies were Asian), was ugly and self-defeating, it has, in the last eight years, become impossible to belief the comforting myth that, our flaws and ugly enterprises aside, America can be counted on, ultimately, to do the right thing. Many of the people who come from places like the Pennsylvania town John Klute hails from are all too ready, without stepping foot here, to view New York City with the judgmentalism that Klute’s modesty, his belief that he’s better than no man, won’t allow him. For them New York is both the place the enemy attacked on 9/11, and the place the people they consider their enemy live. Sutherland’s performance is the loveliest example of his ability to make decency attractive. It’s sad enough losing Donald Sutherland. It will be a tragedy if we lose John Klute.