AUDREY HEPBURN ENCHANTS IN "BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S"

Posted by DEWEY MEE on May 6th 2024

Rarely has a film been so altered from its original source material and still been so successful. Truman Capote's novella "Breakfast At Tiffany's" is dark and cynical in tone. The 1961 film, a classic from director Blake Edwards, becomes a romantic comedy for beloved Audrey Hepburn. And Audrey enchants us as only she can.
Truman Capote wanted his friend Marilyn Monroe to play Holly Golightly. Monroe certainly possessed the "little girl lost" quality so essential for Holly, but was too unstable and unreliable by this time, and the studio said no. In an ironic twist of fate, the introverted and shy Audrey Hepburn, perhaps realizing she couldn't play "Princess roles" forever, decided to play the extraverted, free-spirited Holly. Playing against type, but delightfully and charmingly so, Audrey gives one of the most iconic performances of her career.
Capote's novella is a "memory and mood" piece, where the first person narrator-- a gay aspiring writer-- remembers his elusive, platonic friend Holly, who vanished sometime in the 1940's. The movie, by contrast, puts us in New York City at the dawn of the 1960's. It begins at dawn, and Holly is running away from one of her "clients." Holly does a lot of running away, but, as the now heterosexual writer tells her near the end of the movie, she mostly runs away from herself.
Holly is still a "call girl" who takes "$50 dollars for the powder room"; although this will likely go over the head of younger viewers, who will likely see her as the ultimate bohemian "party girl." She is crazy about Tiffany's jewelry store. "It calms me down right away-- the quietness and the proud look of it. Nothing very bad could happen to you there," she says. "If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany's, then I'd buy some furniture and give (her no-name) cat a name."
Ironically, for all that George Axelrod's screenplay sanitizes from Capote's novella, the movie makes the writer Paul (George Peppard) a "male escort". He is the paid "boy toy" of a bored socialite, known only as the apartment number "2-E" (Patricia Neal). Holly certainly knows what's up when she says, "She works very late hours for a decorator." Spying a load of cash on Paul's bed table, she says, "$300--she's very generous. Is it by the week, the hour, or what? Oh, darling, don't be angry. I understand. I do, really."
Paul falls in love with Holly, Holly remains elusive and noncommittal, and the movie contains just enough comedy vignettes (most memorably, the "Wild Party" scene) to keep the audience entertained. But Holly's chic and glamorous facade comes crashing down when Doc Golightly, (Buddy Ebsen), the much older husband she ran away from long ago, reveals her as a hillbilly girl named Lulamae Barnes-- and he has come to take her "home."
Shattered facades and numerous plot alterations aside, by the time Audrey Hepburn/ Holly searches for the cat in the rain, we are all crying in the rain with her.
This extremely popular 1961 movie was followed by an infamously ill-fated 1966 musical version, that was cancelled just before Broadway, starring Mary Tyler Moore and Richard Chamberlain.