Klute

A Pennsylvania chemical company executive, Tom Gruneman, disappears. The police find an obscene letter in Gruneman's office addressed to a New York City prostitute named Bree Daniels, who had received several such letters. After six months of fruitless police work, Peter Cable, a fellow executive at Gruneman's company, hires family friend and detective John Klute to investigate Gruneman's disappearance.

Klute rents an apartment in the basement of Bree's building, taps her phone, and follows her as she turns tricks. Bree appears to enjoy the freedom of freelancing as a call girl while auditioning for acting and modelling jobs, but she reveals the emptiness of her life to her psychiatrist.

Bree refuses to answer Klute's questions at first. After learning that he has been watching her, Bree says she does not recognize Gruneman. She acknowledges being beaten by a john two years earlier, but cannot identify Gruneman from a photo.

Bree takes Klute to meet her former pimp, Frank Ligourin, who managed Jane McKenna, a prostitute who referred the abusive client to Bree. McKenna has apparently committed suicide, and their other colleague Arlyn Page has since become a drug addict and disappeared.

Klute and Bree develop a romance, although she tells her psychiatrist that she wishes she could go back to "just feeling numb" turning tricks. She tells Klute she is paranoid that she is being watched. They find Page, who tells them the client in the photo is not Gruneman, but an older man instead. Page's body is later found in the river. Klute connects the "suicides" of the two prostitutes, surmising that the client was using Gruneman's name. She also thinks he killed Gruneman and might kill her next. Klute revisits Gruneman's acquaintances. By typographic comparison, the obscene letters are traced to Cable, to whom Klute has been reporting during his investigation.

Klute asks Cable for money to buy the "black book" of McKenna's client's to learn the identity of the abusive client. He leaves enough bread crumbs to see whether Cable reveals his own complicity in the murders.

Cable follows Bree to a client's office and reveals that he sent her the letters. After Gruneman accidentally found him having sex with McKenna, Cable worried Gruneman would use the incident to sabotage his career. Cable tried to frame Gruneman by planting the letter in his office. After playing an audiotape he made as he murdered Page, he attacks Bree. When he sees Klute rush in, Cable jumps through a window to his death.

Bree moves out of her apartment with Klute's help. A voiceover conversation with her psychiatrist reveals her fear of being able to adapt to domestic life, and she jokes that the doctor will likely see her next week. As they are leaving the apartment, Bree gets a telephone call from a client; she tells him she is leaving New York and does not expect to return.

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Klute

• Klute at IMDb
• Klute at the TCM Movie Database
• Klute at AllMovie
• Klute at Rotten Tomatoes
• Klute: Trying to See Her an essay by Mark Harris at the Criterion Collection