Kill James Bond! - S3E26.5: Klute

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

Listen to the rest of this episode Here! ----- You know the drill, if we're silly on main we're being sensible on priv. Today's bonus episode concerns the 1971 Donald Sutherland/Jane Fonda thriller Klute. A small-town cop with zero working facial muscles travels to new york city to investigate his friend's disappearance. His only lead? A call girl who lives in fear of a stalker. ----- FREE PALESTINE Hey, Devon here. For the past few months I've been talking to a family trapped in Gaza, working to cover their daily living costs amidst repeated displacements in the Genocide. Their names are Ahmed and Layla, and their 4 kids are Jana, Malik, Lana and Amir. Anything you can contribute would mean the world to me. They deserve to live. They deserve to survive. https://www.gofundme.com/f/a8jzz-help-me-and-my-family-get-out-of-the-gaza-strip https://www.map.org.uk/donate/donate ----- Consider supporting us on our reasonably-priced patreon! https://www.patreon.com/killjamesbond ------ *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com

INTRO MUSIC Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of Kale James Bond. Hello. And it's the Double Dragon configuration of power, it's Devon and Nova. We're back. We're back and stronger than ever before. Abby was merely keeping us down, our power limiters have been broken. We're now gonna talk about a cool movie from 1971.

We're gonna denounce every working actor. That Tom Cruise bloke. Seems weird. I dunno. ALICE Yeah! Yeah, I dunno what's going on with that. Impossible to say. LILITH He seems interpersonally nice.

I dunno, whatever. ALICE But yeah, this is your bonus pick, Dev, which means that it's going to be about 1970s perverts. You know? LILITH That's right. ALICE We're establishing a firm niche here with this and cruising, right? Like...

RIght. Yeah, I watched this quite recently, because Donald Sutherland passed away very recently. 20th of June, 2024, and I ended up watching this and absolutely loved it. I rated it five stars, I feel like on rewatch maybe 4 and a half is more fair, but like... ALICE You can spoil yourself on upcoming content for us by following both of us on Letterboxd, right? ABI Yes. ALICE Abbie doesn't have one because she's too

busy making movies to review them, but like, you can tell... ABI She's been in more than she's watched, that's the sort of dark place. ALICE The issue here is, that if you follow both of us on MesaBox you'll see that we both watched Clute. RILEY We did. ALICE And you gave it five stars, faved it, and wrote a review calling it sensational.

RILEY That was the one word that I used in my review. ALICE Yep, yep, yep. That's the poor quote on the poster, and then I gave it... RILEY Sensational. ALICE And then I gave it three and a half stars. So once again... That's so fair. I just saw Jane Fonda acting her fuckin' ass off in this movie.

Oh, Jane Fonda's great in this. The things that she does, she's so real. Like Jane Fonda's great in this, Donald Sutherland's great in this, I think much like cruising, right. Don't Southerland's great in this, I think, much like cruising, one of the things that we're diverging on is directorial style, right? This movie is very New Hollywood. If you don't know what New Hollywood is, it's like, like, Taxi Driver, right? Like, is New Hollywood, or Mean Streets, or...

Anything with pervasive 70s themes of alienation and paranoia, and often women have their tits out, that's New Hollywood, right? I believe that they didn't let you make a movie in the 70s if there weren't any tits in it. Like, I think that they actually... Yes. Sort of the Academy was like, you have to put the tits in or we'll lose money in China. And the Academy did like this movie, like, Jane Fonda won an Academy Award for Best Actress

off of this. Which she deserved. And I think my beef with The New Hollywood is sort of that functionally I thought it was kind of like a rebel gloss on the same stuff, and I think that's gonna be my objection to this movie too. LWX That's entirely reasonable. ALICE But, but, this is like, we're very much in the sort of 70s paranoia thing. The conversation, movies like that, like this is a movie that has a real kind of like, fixation

with the tape recorder and the phone as being like instruments of terror and repression, y'know? RILEY Yeah, this is directed by a guy called Alan J. Pecula, this was his second movie that he ever directed. ALICE Dracula being asked to make up a fake name on the spot, like... RILEY This guy, he did a bunch of movies, he did all the Presence Men with fucking... Redford? ALICE Yeah, Royal Redford, yeah.

RILEY He actually died in an extremely final destination, as well, I didn't know about this. I looked up... 1998, he was driving on the Long Island Expressway, when a driver in front of him kicked up a metal pipe that came straight through his windshield and hit him in the head. Oooh, Jesus! And just died on the spot, because that's the kind of thing that kills a person. ALICE Extremely loud metal pipe dropping to floor noise.

RILEY Terrible. ALICE Wow. Okay. RILEY It can happen at any time. ALICE This, well, I'm crossing out the note that I wrote here that says the director of this should be killed with a huge metal pipe through the windshield of his car. It was really prophetic of me, this is- RILEY Someone should shoot a metal pipe through the windshield of his car. It was really prophetic of me, just like... RILEY Someone should shoot a metal pipe at this guy.

ALICE But, yeah, no, this is... It's sort of like, of that kind of... It's sometimes conceived of being in a paranoia trilogy with all the President's Men and the Parallax View, which is also by this guy. And I like the other two of those movies better than this, but... RILEY That's reasonable. I haven't seen them, I'm looking forward to. ALICE Absolutely.

RILEY Damn, this guy did Sophie's Choice, what? ALICE Really? Huh. RILEY Gotta close that Wikipedia page and record the podcast. ALICE The two of us with, like, much less functional ADHD have been left to try and, like, drive the plot of this movie along. READING WIKIPEDIR and be like, wow, there's facts in here. So yeah, opening shot, I guess, we'll start out, we open on a dinner party.

It's shot very congenially, it's like everyone's laughing and doing banter, and then there's a guy at the head of the table called Tom, and he's talked to twice, he seems a little distracted. And then we hard cut to the same table, with a couple of the same people around it, in the same seats, but they're being talked to by a group of cops who are going, Tom's gone. Tom disappeared a couple of days ago, he might be dead. ALICE. Tom Gruneman. And we immediately see Donald Sutherland, his best friend, Donald Sutherland, who was

a cop in this small town of Tuscarora, Pennsylvania, and who was, like, baffled as his wife is, why would he disappear, why would, y'know, why would he do this? And the cops kind of indelicately ask, was there anything about, like, was he weird about sex? Was your late husband a sex freak, man? And was he, like, the sort of missing person in a 70s psychological horror? Yeah, he's like, listen, I have to ask this, it's sort of boilerplate, was he a real freak with her? Was he, like, strange style?

Did he like anything unusual? And his wife's like, no. But they're like, wow, we found a letter in his desk that's addressed to a woman in New York called Bree. And it's this really, like, salacious... We don't know what the internals of the letter are, I don't know if we ever see it. It's just, like, horny in a, like, threatening way. ALICE Exactly.

It's like a threateningly, like, sort of sexually abusive letter, right? And the wife doesn't believe this, and we see that Donald Sutherland has some doubts too, right? There's also, throughout this, we're getting audio recording, like a tape. And this is taking us through the opening credits, right? Of Brie Daniels, this woman, this cool girl. This being the 70s, she has a very kind of psychological affect, and one of the things that she does, that we hear her do, when she's talking to a client, is to kind of put him

at his ease by talking about how, there's nothing like... I don't think that's terribly unusual, sentence constructions like that. Yeah, exactly. And essentially saying that there's nothing wrong, there's nothing shameful, with anything more or less sexual, right, that she won't judge him. There's one of the lines here, I think the only way any of us can ever be happy is to let it all hang out. Which is very 70s, in phrasing.

Yes. Extremely so. And we get the first shot post credits, I love the low energy, I'm having a good time here actually. The first shot post credits is of a fashion lineup, right? Like a casting lineup for a fashion. Yeah, it's a cattle call. They're shooting a cosmetics ad, and it's like a line full of women with the producers

and the ad executives going down and openly... RILEY They're talking to each girl, they're like, can I see your hands? Your hands look like a man's hands, fuck you. They're talking about each girl like they're not there. ALICE It's like, clockey. Yes. RILEY Like turning to each other and being like, oh no, the color's a bit off.

Which is crazy, to say. Yeah, she says one of them is too pretty. I take that. I take that as feedback. That's fine. We see Jane Fonda get passed over for this role, right, and in fact all of them get passed over and they bring in some more women, right? So we're clearly, we're setting down the stall here, like, oh, we're in the business of objectifying

women, right? This is, the movie is, it's feminist, it's feminist. It's feminist, fuck. We'll see. Whoa whoa whoa whoa. That's enough of that. If you wanna hear the rest of this high energy and exciting episode of Kill James Bond, you're gonna have to go to the Patreon.

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