Let's Talk About the Cat in Klute!

a neo-noir classic has a very interesting feline presence

Last week I attended a matinee screening of Klute (1971) as part of IFC’s Donald Sutherland retrospective. I had never seen the crime fiction classic, and viewing it in all its ‘70s glory on the big screen did not disappoint! The story, in which the titular private investigator (played to understated perfection by Sutherland) looks into the disappearance of a friend and gets drawn into affairs both nefarious and sensual in gritty NYC, is a classic noir plot. The film is also part of director Alan J. Pakula’s “paranoia trilogy,”¹ engaging with themes of surveillance and conspiracies. But you know what, I’m actually not going to talk about any of that! However, spoilers for the film do follow, so if you care about such things give it a watch before scrolling any further!

As a devoted, some might say over-attached?, human who belongs to a fluffy torbie named Jim,² I am always hyperconscious of companion animals in film. So when Jane Fonda’s Bree Daniels,³ a sex worker trying to reimagine her life as an actress and model (but who gets drawn into the drama by Sutherland’s Klute because she might have been one of the last people to have contact with the missing man) prepares for the day by dumping some canned food in a dish on the floor, my kitty senses were tingling.⁴ There is also a box of cat treats prominently placed on the top of the fridge, and in a scene where Bree is detoxing, a messy litter box is visible on the floor of her one-room apartment. But you know what’s not visible ever in the first hour or so of the film? A CAT.

Bree never calls for, looks for, or speaks of owning a cat. It was an absence so glaring that I began to think that she might have already lost the cat, and her continual care for it was a sign of delusion.⁵ But nay! After Bree begins to surrender to the safety and pleasure of her developing relationship with Klute, he finds her on the floor of her now clean and tidy apartment, cuddling a calico cat. Now we’re getting somewhere (bad, because it’s a noir)!

The looming threat of the man whom Klute suspects likely killed his missing friend, as well as two other sex workers Bree knew, becomes explicit once the couple come home from a pleasant date to her ransacked apartment. All the furniture is upended, her mattress is slashed, and her clothes have been cut to pieces and defiled. Now if it’s me, the FIRST THING I focus on is where is my cat, and since it is me, a person who has watched a lot of movies, I was CERTAIN we were about to see the body of Bree’s cat as a warning and threat. That has to be the reason we (finally) saw the cat in a previous scene, right? So we could know how much such a loss would hurt her? I was so confident in my ability to predict this bit of nastiness.

Reader, I was wrong!⁶ No one mentions or looks for the cat, even when Bree is trying to find a place to stay other than her compromised apartment. Yet again I began to mistrust my very eyes. Did I hallucinate the sweet scene between Bree and the calico?

NOPE. After the film has come to its bloody and quite thrilling conclusion, we see Bree and Klute in her now empty apartment, getting ready to presumably move in together in Pennsylvania. And do you know what else we see? ONE CALICO CAT IN A CARRIER.

So what does all this mean? In a text exchange with a friend after the movie, I speculated that the cat was a metaphor for Bree’s domestication: we only see the cat when she is happy about and accepting of her relationship with Klute. My friend, an animal studies scholar, noted that it could also mean the opposite: the cat is a feline manifestation of Bree’s life as a sex worker, “catting around.” So, when the cat is contained and confined at the end of the film when Bree has decided to leave NYC for good, and Klute himself is holding the carrier, what should we take from that? Is it a positive sign of Bree’s capacity to care for herself and others (much like the cat in Breakfast at Tiffany’s)? Or is it more darkly suggestive of Bree’s inability to commit to a loving relationship? After all, the voiceover at the movie’s conclusion is Bree telling her therapist she’ll probably be back. Or the third option, am I being too much of an English major and way overdetermining this element of the film?

I’d be curious to hear my reader’s thoughts on this and other cinematic cats! And for my McGoohan Hive, you best believe I’ve seen and have thoughts on The Three Lives of Thomasina!

1. The other two films are The Parallax View (1974), which I have never seen, and All the President’s Men (1976), which I psychotically love.

2

3. She won an Oscar for her performance!

4. I’ll need to do a rewatch to confirm this, but I’m almost positive that after scraping *something* from a tin into the bowl, she puts the fork in her mouth to clean it. Could be tuna, could be she’s eating cat food. Any readers more well-versed in Klute than I, please clarify!

5. Granted, this could be an indoor/outdoor cat. However, she lives on an upper floor of an apartment building, and we never see her opening a door or a window to let the cat in or out.

6. Thank God. I can’t stand violence towards animals in movies, and make frequent use of the invaluable website DoestheDogDie?