Director Blake Edwards (USA). Year of Release: 1961
Manhattan, late at night / first thing in the morning. A single yellow taxi drives down a deserted road. It stops and a woman gets out wearing sunglasses and a black dress. Basically, she’s dressed like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Sipping from a cardboard cup, she peers into the window of an expensive looking building. It’s Tiffany’s, the posh person’s jewellery shop. The soundtrack plays an instrumental version of Moon River, a song which we might hear again later.
Later that night/morning, the bell rings in an apartment block, much to the annoyance of Mickey Rooney who’s wearing false buck teeth and yellow face. However prepared we are for Rooney’s appearance, its hard not to be overwhelmed by how offensive it is. He is very annoyed because Holly Golightly has forgotten her door key again and is expecting him to let her in. She is drunk, loud, and still wearing the same clothes as in the previous scene.
Holly meets her new upstairs neighbour – a man who eventually introduces himself as novelist Paul Varjak. But he hasn’t had anything published in a while and largely makes his money as the kept man of a rich woman. Holly, for her part, gets by on liasons with men who often bang on her door in the middle of the night. She also has an understanding with mafia boss Sally Tomato who she visits every week in Sing Sing prison to provide him with “weather reports” provided by his lawyer.
And that’s about it. Paul and Holly visit parties in the building, attended by insufferable people. She continues to pursue rich men who can keep her in the manner to which she’s been accustomed, and tries to get herself married off, first to a young and not particularly attractive millionaire, later to a Brazilian diplomat. They scamper up and down the fire escape which connects their two rooms, on which Holly sits with a guitar at one stage and sings Moon River.
If you want to know just how much the film depends on Audrey Hepburn’s vivacious charm, just sit back one minute and think about just how unsympathetic a character Holly really is. A gold digger who chases the nearest rich man, she may have had a difficult past, but her reaction to this was to abandon her family, including her beloved brother Fred. Even the safe place where she feels at ease – Tiffany’s – is the spiritual home to rampant consumerism, not kindness and solidarity.
And yet, while Hepburn occupies the screen, we don’t so much excuse Holly’s nature as not even consider it. Apparently the character in Truman Capote’s original novella was significantly different, and Capote was adamant that Marilyn Monroe should play Holly, which would certainly have resulted in a different film. This could have added some edge to Holly’s character, which may have been better, may have been worse, but it would certainly have been different.
But this film works because of Hepburn, almost despite the script. Certainly the two leading men make little contribution to our enjoyment. Rooney’s yellowed up performance is just embarrassing, and George Peppard as Paul is wooden. There are those who might get excited at the sight of his naked barrel chest sitting up in bed, but I’m not one of them. It’s no real surprize that Holly doesn’t want to rush into a relationship with him.
On a couple of occasions, people in the film – let’s be specific, men – refer to Holly as being mad, but that’s not quite right. Surely Holly is a prototype Manic Pixie Dream Girl. The gay Capote may have created her, but the Holly we see on screen has been developed by Hollywood scriptwriters to personify a male fantasy of what women are supposed to be like. It says heaps about Hepburn’s acting capacities that the character does not end up a complete stereotype.
Whatever you want to say about Breakfast at Tiffany’s, it is indisputably an iconic film. Just 2 doors down from the cinema, a shop selling smoking equipment had a picture if Audrey Hepburn with a cigarette holder in the window. This is also the film which inspired one of our great pop songs (no, not that one. Please not that one. I’m talking about the Wedding Present’s Don’t take me Home till I’m Drunk)
Ultimately, the film sells out (and sorry, I can’t do this without a plot spolier). Paul makes a pious speech calling Holly a chicken with no guts: “You’re afraid to stick out your chin and say, ‘Okay, life’s a fact, people do fall in love, people do belong to each other, because that’s the only chance anybody’s got for real happiness.’ … You call yourself a free spirit, a wild thing, and you’re terrified somebody’s gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you’re already in that cage. You built it yourself.”
Ant then, a film which for the main has been challenging the idea of love and marriage as cure-alls ends with its two leads in a passionate clinch. This is a terrible Hollywood ending, possibly all worse because Holly obviously cares more for her nameless cat than she does for her mahogany co-star. If Holly had been allowed to march into the sunset hand-in-paw with her cat everything would have been fine. But that’s not what happens in Hollywood, certainly not in 1961.
A propos the year. Breakfast at Tiffany’s was released the year after Spartacus broke the McCarthy ban on acknowledging radical film workers. Left wing writers who had been forced to work under pseudonyms for a decade or more were slowly starting to assert themselves. Which helps add confusion to the politics of Tiffany’s. There’s the racism and ultimate faith in the family, but this is also a film about a woman who, notwithstanding her neuroses, is allowed to act upon society.
There is also implicit social criticism – about the way in which Holly and Paul are forced into unfortunate transactions in order to survive. Apparently these are clearer in the book than the film, so maybe it’s worth reading that if you want more insight. But the clear thing that the film has over the book is a marvellous performance by one of our great actors. This is Hepburn’s film, and it clearly she who makes it great.
CinePhil 