And I said what about “Breakfast at Tiffany’s?
She said, “I think I remember the film,
And as I recall, I think, we both kinda liked it.”
And I said, “Well, that’s the one thing we’ve got.”
-Deep Blue Something
Breakfast at Tiffany’s stars Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, and a big orange cat named Cat. There are also appearances by Patricia Neal, Buddy Ebsen, and Mickey Rooney. Rooney plays a Japanese man in one of those great Hollywood stereotypes with thick glasses and buck teeth. Clearly there were no real Japanese anywhere to be found in 1961. Breakfast at Tiffany’s was directed by the great Blake Edwards, before he was sentenced to making Pink Panther films for the rest of his life.
John Wayne famously played John Wayne in all of his movies and I always had much the same feeling about Audrey Hepburn. And I don’t see anything wrong with that-I love watching Audrey Hepburn and she is perfect for the role of a woman who is a magnet for men her whole life, though she does nothing to attract them. Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe to play the part of Holly Golightly and I think she would have been perfect for the role as well. She was a real life Holly Golightly after all- men wanted her and women wanted to be her.
Audrey Hepburn sang “Moon River” in a wonderfully melancholy fashion and helped win an Oscar for Best Song for composer Henry Mancini and lyricist Johnny Mercer. The film also marked the high point of George Peppard’s career, here he is a serious actor and not the Leader of The A-Team or fighting Killer Cockroaches as he does in Damnation Alley. It is also interesting to see Buddy Ebsen playing what amounts to Jed Calmpett in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, as the long ignored husband of Holly Golightly.
My favorite scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is where Holly and Fred go into Tiffany’s in order to buy something-but they only have ten dollars. They think about silver plated corn holders, but decide instead to get something engraved-a tin ring from a box of Cracker Jacks. It is a cute scene with a wonderful dead pan performance by John McGiver, who seems to have worked at least once on every TV show I watched growing up.
While Holly Golightly is an odd character in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s, she is nowhere near as odd as she was in Truman Capote’s short story-where Holly runs off to Africa never to been seen again. In Truman Capote’s Breakfast At Tiffany’s Holly Golightly is a flame that draws every moth see encounters and she is not all that happy about it. If you haven’t read the novella really you should. It doesn’t take long and it is a bit different from the story the movie portrays.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a great movie and the scene at the end with the rain and Cat made for a great standard issue Hollywood ending. It gets me every time.
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