It could have gone wrong so easily. But the movie that resulted from this nervous collaboration embodies, in the most rewarding way, the transformations and contradictions that defined American cinema at the dawn of one of its most creatively fertile eras. Klute is not, as Pakula feared it would be, “a character study in a melodrama” but rather a character study that uses the trappings of melodrama to deepen its portrait of the character it’s studying. The film undercuts every expectation it sets up: it’s a cop movie that isn’t about the cop; a modern western that almost never leaves the canyons, hideaways, and saloons of Manhattan; a whodunit that, with defiant indifference, gives away the “who” after forty minutes; and a thriller that, although menace seems to choke every frame, contains almost no violence at all. No wonder some critics were baffled: Variety’s reviewer dismissed it as a “mixed-up sex-crime pic” and a “suspenser without much suspense.” The Village Voice’s Molly Haskell, one of the first to grasp what Pakula was doing, put it better, writing that he “uses suspense the way some people use music, as background atmosphere.” (In that, Pakula got an essential assist from Michael Small’s eerily evocative score, which always seems to suggest unsettling sounds coming from the next apartment.)

Although Klute ended up as a remarkable example of what Hollywood movies had the potential to become, it began its life as little more than a minor reworking of what they had long been. Looking to get out of TV, the Lewis brothers came up with what Andy later described as a variation on a tried-and-true premise he had remembered from the Saturday Evening Post western stories of his childhood: “the rube who turns the tables on the city slickers.” The concept was one of which movies never seemed to tire—Don Siegel had recently dusted it off for the Clint Eastwood action film Coogan’s Bluff—and its newest embodiment would be John Klute, a detective from tiny Tuscarora, Pennsylvania, who is hired to find out what happened to a businessman who disappeared, possibly in New York City and possibly in connection with a prostitute, six months earlier.

Before The Sterile Cuckoo, Pakula had spent his entire film career not as a director but as a producer, working exclusively with Robert Mulligan, a socially conscious filmmaker whose work during the sixties had touched on racism (To Kill a Mockingbird), abortion (Love with the Proper Stranger), homosexuality (Inside Daisy Clover), and the plight of inner-city high schoolers (Up the Down Staircase), often showcasing strong, idiosyncratic female leads. During those same years, Fonda had been busy playing ingenue roles, from Barefoot in the Park to Barbarella, until she broke out with her unstinting performance as a despairing marathon-dance competitor in Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? When Pakula signed on for Klute, he approached her almost immediately, and although the newly politicized actor wondered “if it wasn’t politically incorrect to play a call girl,” as she later admitted in her autobiography, she took the role.