The giallo is known to be a primarily Italian form of genre cinema, and there’s every reason it should be. From its roots to its origins, its rise to prominence during the 1970s and its long lasting influence on films and film fandom that can be seen to this day, the giallo is one of Italian cinema’s best exports. The American version of the giallo is a subgenre that absolutely exists, although, like most subgenres, its edges aren’t so easily or rigidly defined. The Italian giallo is generally easy to spot; they’re typically whodunit murder mysteries that involve affluent characters, beautiful people in various states of undress, a psychosexual element to the killer (or killers’) motivation, and so on. Yet the American giallo lays at the intersection of such various other cultural forces as the works of Alfred Hitchcock (himself a major influence on the Italian giallo), the slasher boom of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the tradition of film noir, and the erotic thrillers which emerged from that tradition.
As with most trends in cinema, it takes a few years for those running behind to catch up, which means American films didn’t really start responding to the Italian giallo in a big way until around the mid- to late-‘70s. Because of this, the starting point of the American giallo is generally assumed to be around the time of Alice, Sweet Alice in 1976. Yet, much like slasher aficionados tend to cite Black Christmas or Bay of Blood over Halloween as the true beginning of that subgenre, the American giallo very likely began with Alan J. Pakula’s Klute in 1971. Due to the giallo’s popularity being relatively recent at the time of Klute’s release (especially in America), most of the discourse surrounding the film then and now tends to reference its elements of film noir and Hitchcock, along with its emergent feminism and counter-culture ennui. Moreover, there’s the retrospective addition of the movie to Pakula’s thematic “paranoia trilogy,” lumping it in with his post-Watergate conspiracy thrillers The Parallax View and All the President’s Men. Clearly, Klute is a movie with much more on its mind than being a down-and-dirty genre thriller.
Yet its thriller and genre elements are undeniable, especially when considered in context with the giallos that preceded and followed it. In Klute, the titular detective (Donald Sutherland), a relatively affluent Pennsylvanian, is tasked with finding a missing (wealthy) friend who apparently had ties to a New York City call girl named Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda). Thus, the film is partially about the culture shock and culture clash between the characters’ classes and their respective culture, a trope often seen in the giallos of director Umberto Lenzi. Although Pakula, in conjunction with writers Andy and Dave Lewis, makes a very Hitchcockian choice to reveal the killer to the audience early in the runtime, the first half is still very much a whodunit, as are the majority of giallo films. While this choice pivots the film more toward character study than tawdry thriller, it continues to highlight the killer’s fetishistic and kinky modus operandi: he records the audio of each of his murders, all of whom are call girls. This presages similarly kink-obsessed giallo killers, from the provocative title of Andrea Bianchi’s Strip Nude For Your Killer to the murderer of Dario Argento’s Opera, who insists on making his ultimate victim watch each of his killings by tying her up and placing needles just beneath her eyes to keep them open.
The relationship of sex and death is present in most horror films. The giallo is famous for exploiting the fascination of both states of being, the better to highlight the danger of arousal clouding the rational mind, a danger that threatens both men and women. In Klute, not only is the killer’s mind shattered by the disconnect between his public persona and his violently carnal desires, but John Klute’s carefully constructed moral worldview is challenged by the mercurial Bree, who herself is thrown by her growing affection (and attendant repulsion) for Klute. The psychosexual dynamics of the characters not only precedes what would soon become the erotic thriller, but develops the latent themes within Hitchcock’s work that would later be made explicit by filmmakers like Brian De Palma and David Lynch; there’s much of Blue Velvet’s Jeffrey and Twin Peaks’ Agent Cooper in Klute, for instance. Fonda’s rightfully lauded performance brilliantly demonstrates the conflicts and changes occurring within Bree, but Sutherland’s underrated, understated work as Klute gives Fonda space to shine, and allows John to be both an audience proxy (almost a Greek chorus) and a hopeless dullard.
The two most prominent aspects that tie Klute to the giallo are its cinematography and score. Klute is one of the first films lensed by cinematographer Gordon Willis, whose work in conjunction with Pakula was to make early ‘70s New York suffused with shadows—so much so that each frame of the film appears as if it’s trying to swallow the people within it. This approach not only works with the thematic material and eerie tone, it also clearly influenced Willis when he went to make his one and only directorial effort a decade later, 1980’s Windows, which contains its own psychosexual giallo-style plot. The score, composed by Michael Small, is as multi-faceted as the film it accompanies, sliding between moody jazz-pop and more atmospheric menace. Most telling is its use of a female vocalist, who crops up singing a breathy “la-la-la” refrain. This motif can be viewed as either the voices of the dead haunting (or alluring) the killer, or as Bree’s own, lone voice amidst a sea of darkness. The choice seems to deliberately echo (or homage) Ennio Morricone’s use of breathy female vocals for his score to Argento’s The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, vocals that are similarly ambiguous as to whether they’re erotic moans of pleasure or troubling groans of pain.
While it’s true that Klute doesn’t necessarily revel in its genre trappings, and is certainly much more than an average thriller or giallo, it’s nonetheless a sterling example of the form. There’s a good reason why select scenes turn up in the 1984 clip show-cum-visual essay Terror in the Aisles; the movie brilliantly layers themes and emotion in with a large amount of tension and fear, making it both a rich and visceral experience. The giallo was always going to find its way to American shores eventually, and its tropes would’ve undoubtedly influenced our cinema regardless. Yet without Klute, it may have taken longer, and perhaps wouldn’t have resulted in so many great films which followed its lead.