Blake Edwards (1961)
One of the bonuses of watching films at BFI is seeing the original trailers for movies released before your cinema-going time. The casting of Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in the screen version of Breakfast at Tiffany’s was seen as evidence in itself of a sanitised adaptation of the Truman Capote original but the picture isn’t nearly as determinedly wholesome as the trailer – even if that wholesomeness was disingenuous on the part of the people who wrote the legends for it. (‘It’s everything you’ve always wanted to do … and Audrey Hepburn’s the one you’ve always wanted to do it with’.) Breakfast at Tiffany’s is an enduringly and deservedly popular romantic comedy – though I prefer the romance to the comedy, or the overt comedy anyway. The set- piece drunken party, peopled by Manhattan socialites behaving with varying degrees of outrageousness, may have been funny at the time (perhaps especially for Manhattan socialites in the audience) but Blake Edwards isn’t sufficiently inventive to bring it off. Each of the incidents and visual gags looks ‘placed’ without that seeming like a deliberate effect. And, though it’s an obvious thing to say now, the scenes involving Holly’s Japanese neighbour Mr Yunioshi (Mickey Rooney) are offensive. (They also make you wonder if, just fifteen years after the end of World War II, this racial humour was meant to be something more than merely patronising.) This isn’t Mickey Rooney’s fault – he’s technically very accomplished – but the routines involving Yunioshi are crude in terms of comic content as well as conception. A shoplifting sequence involving the leads is nicely done but, on the whole, Edwards’ direction is worse whenever he’s trying for an obviously dynamic effect. The drugs bust sequence, for example, is tediously frenetic.
In other respects, though, this must be Blake Edwards’s best picture. The first long exchange between Holly and Paul Varjak, the struggling screenwriter who also lives in her block is admirably done. He’s in bed, she comes up the fire escape and in through his window, and they talk: there’s real emotional movement in the scene. I hadn’t realised the close kinship of Holly and Isherwood’s Sally Bowles, even if Holly’s ambitions are more limited: she seems just to want a fabulously rich husband. Holly is comforted, not made envious, by the vast wealth that a place like Tiffany’s evokes and both the sequences involving the store are highlights. There are the famous images under the opening titles as Holly, in the early morning, arrives home dressed for the night before: wearing evening gloves, holding a takeaway coffee in one hand and a croissant in the other, she stands looking into the jeweller’s window. The scene in which Holly and Paul go shopping in Tiffany’s is a delight as it develops from what seems set to be a comedy sketch into something richer. This is thanks largely to a beautifully controlled cameo from John McGiver (Senator Jordan in The Manchurian Candidate) as the salesman.
Audrey Hepburn, as Capote knew, is too classy as Holly (he wanted Marilyn Monroe for the role). You never believe she’s pretending, let alone failing, to be as chic as Holly wants to appear. You certainly don’t believe the revelation that she’s really Lula Mae Barnes from rural Texas. Yet although Hepburn is basically miscast she gives one of her very best performances here. Of course she’s witty and charming and wears the Givenchy gowns perfectly but she does much more. I don’t think people realise how good an actress she has to be to express Holly’s égarement simply by standing, with her back to the camera, outside the window of Tiffany’s. Hepburn uses her slenderness throughout to suggest Holly’s insecurity and there’s real depth in the occasional outbursts of panic, when Holly feels ‘the mean reds … suddenly you’re afraid and you don’t know what of’. Hepburn’s singing of ‘Moon River’ is truly memorable: star glamour and characterisation are perfectly balanced here and her voice is just right too – good enough to carry the song, not strong enough to risk losing vulnerability. George Peppard’s portrait of Paul, who falls in love with Holly, is hugely underrated, because his moods are registered so subtly. Peppard plays off Hepburn skilfully and gives surprising substance to the moments when Paul expresses his sulky frustration with Holly and being rejected by her. Peppard’s (and Blake Edwards’s) judgment of what’s needed at these moments is very acute. He gets us to understand how Paul is feeling but he doesn’t do it in a way that detracts from Hepburn’s appeal.
There are other good people in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Paul is humiliated not just by his failures as a writer but by the fact that he’s a kept man. As the matron who pays his rent in return for favours, Patricia Neal is expert at being in calm control then losing it eventually. Martin Balsam is excellent in the small role of a wearily tense agent. Vilallonga (of whom I’d never heard) is rather bland as the Brazilian plutocrat Holly tries to marry but Buddy Ebsen is touching as her Texan ex-husband. But the third standout performance, with Hepburn’s and Peppard’s, is from the ginger cat who shares Holly’s apartment – ‘the poor slob without a name’, simply referred to as ‘Cat’. Cat and Holly belong together – both waifs and strays. According to Wikipedia and IMDB, Orangey, who plays the cat, is one of the very select band of multiple winners of the Patsy (Picture Animal Top Star of the Year) – the equivalent of the Oscar for non-human animal actors. He had a remarkably long screen career, stretching from Rhubarb (1951) to an episode of Mission Impossible in 1967. Breakfast at Tiffany’s brought him his second Patsy. In addition to that, the film won Oscars for Best Score (Henry Mancini) and Best Song (Mancini and Johnny Mercer). Just hearing ‘Moon River’ stirs up strong nostalgic feelings for me but Audrey Hepburn doing the song enriches its emotional power. Still, it was Orangey who had me in tears at the end. I wanted Holly and Paul to get together but not as much as I wanted her to find Cat safe and sound after she’s desperately chucked him out of a yellow cab. It’s hard to beat the film’s closing shot of girl and boy embracing, cat safely retrieved and tucked under Holly’s raincoat in a real Hollywood downpour, and a choir singing us out – ‘My Huckleberry friend … ‘ – as the camera pulls up and away to get the best possible view of the happy ending.
26 January 2011
