Double Feature

July 2008 - School's out, vacation season is here. What better time to catch a classic movie that somehow you've managed to miss the first 50 times it's been on TV. Here are a couple of oldies but goodies.

First is Klute, an R-rated murder drama from 1971. Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland star. Roy Scheider, pre-Jaws, has a smaller role. Jean Stapleton also appears briefly.

Sutherland plays the title character, John Klute. He's a cop from Tuscarora, PA, hired by a businessman to find out what happened to the man's co-worker. The search leads Klute to New York City and a hooker named Bree Daniel (Fonda). Bree is trying to make it as an actress, but she saves her best acting for her clients. She falls in love with Klute but isn't sure she wants to give up control of her life to be with him. For Bree, controlling her johns is the one thing she has going for her, but Klute is the one "John" she can't control.

Overall review: Liked it. Jane Fonda won an Oscar for this role, and she deserves it. It's hard to tell where the real Bree ends and the acting Bree begins. The movie also holds up well despite being made in 1971. If there's a downfall, it's that we know who the killer is well before Klute does. The murder mystery is really just background noise for a love story.

It's not love but sexual tension that bristles through Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 classic North by Northwest in which Cary Grant is an advertising executive who finds himself a long way from Madison Avenue. Eva Marie Saint, James Mason and Martin Landau also star.

Grant plays Roger Thornhill. He's having drinks with some colleagues when he's suddenly kidnapped and taken to a mansion on Long Island. The people there (Mason and Landau) seem to believe that Thornhill's name is Kaplan. He tells them it's not, but they don't believe him. Thornhill manages to escape, then tries to track down Kaplan himself. In the end, he ends up with Eva Marie Saint on Mount Rushmore.

Overall review: Liked it. The suspense here comes from watching Thornhill try to stay alive as he's pursued by Mason and his gang, who are suspected of espionage. Also, I found the dialogue between Grant and Saint surprisingly bold. I wasn't expecting such overt sexual banter, but maybe that's because more modern movies skip the banter and go right to the sex.

My main criticisms are plot-related. At one point, Thornhill takes a bus to Indiana and is dropped off pretty much in the middle of a cornfield. Yet, another bus comes along a few minutes later, and there's also a fair amount of other traffic - more than I expected for such a road. I was also disappointed by the method Mason used to carry out his espionage. Like the CIA couldn't figure out THAT? Of course, I guess if they had, we wouldn't have a movie, would we?