Klute

This is the second film I have watched with Jane Fonda in one week...this time around with a really bad hairdo but in a much better film.

The Klute in the title is John Klute, acting as private detective when a friend disappears, leaving behind one very strange letter of abuse addressed to a prostitute in New York City, and the police are ready to give up on the case. That would be six months after the disappearance.

John goes off to New York to investigate and talk with the prostitute in question, one Bree Daniel. Now, Bree has regular meetings with a psychiatrist, musing about how she wants to quit 'tricks' and concentrate on her work as a model and actress (wait, is this officially called 'actor' now, too?). Or maybe she doesn't want to quit. She seems unsure and her efforts to turn her life around are half-hearted at best.

Initially reluctant to help John in any way, she does eventually get involved, tagging along as he interviews people working within her trade, trying to find other prostitutes said to have met with a weird guy that used to beat them up. It is generally believed that this is the missing friend, named Tom. Then they come upon one girl that does not identify Tom from a photo John Klute shows her and says that it was an older looking man, instead.

It is at this point that I knew who the real culprit was and the conclusion that Tom is probably dead is pretty obvious, as well. The real criminal is the person actually financing John Klute to investigate Tom's disappearance. Now that John is getting close, though, he starts to try and clean up all lose ends.

In the end, John saves Bree and they leave her apartment together, although to a voice over of her again sounding unsure about what is going to happen.

7/10

The Russia House

I'm confused. But this is a John le Carré story, so that was to be expected.

What I gather is this: Barley, a British publisher, is recruited by the Secret Service to spy on the Russians, as he has been contacted by a Russian publisher, Katya, regarding a scientific book by one Dante (not his real name).

From then on, he wears wires seemingly everywhere he goes in Moscow and Leningrad. He meets with Katya, later with Dante and some sort of deal is struck, that would have him hand over what everyone refers to as 'the shopping list' (written in invisible ink, no less).

By now, the Brits have teamed up with the US Secret Service as well and people from both sides wearing more or less appealing suits sit in a room together listening in with headphones. Then the British liaison to Barley, Ned, gets suspicious and wants to call the final handover off. But the Americans push on (of course). Words are exchanged, the go ahead as planned and of course Ned was right all along.

Dante apparently is already dead at the time he was supposed to meet with Barley, who has worked out that something is wrong thanks to Katya. He then makes his own plan to double cross his home country. All for the love of Katya.

Or something like that.

6/10