Breakfast at Tiffany's

I've seen Blake Edwards' Breakfast at Tiffany's, a big hit of 1961, at least three times, and each time I like it less. Watching it yesterday I could barely get through it. After history and repeat viewings the only thing that really stands out is Audrey Hepburn's iconic performance as Holly Golightly, but the rest comes across as mush.

Part of my problem is knowing how they changed Truman Capote's novel. I've never read it, but I know enough about it (an episode of Seinfeld hinges on the differences between novel and movie). Now, it's very rare for a movie to be true to the source material, but this adaptation, by George Axelrod, misses the boat entirely. Golightly is supposed to be, as Capote writes, an "American geisha." She is pointedly not a prostitute, but more of a golddigger--going out with rich men and getting expensive gifts in return (this is typified by being handed $50 for going to tip the powder room attendant). She is a woman who escaped a life of being a teen bride to a much older man in rural Texas, changing her name from Lula Mae Barnes. Now she lives in a nice apartment on the Upper East Side of New York, having almost no permanent possessions--even her cat is unnamed, and to make herself happy she longingly looks in the window at Tiffany's.

The film does fine by that, but where it errs is in the leading man, played blandly by George Peppard. The narrator and friend of Holly in the book is gay, so to have the two form a romance and a sappy Hollywood ending, hugging in the rain with a soaked cat in between them, rankles. Axelrod goes further and makes Peppard a struggling writer but also a kept man--the character played by Patricia Neal, a wealthy decorator, sleeping with Peppard and then leaving money on the dresser, was invented for the movie.

And I just can't get with the tone of some these late 50s, early 60s madcap comedies. There's a party scene at Hepburn's full of oddball types, such as Martin Balsam playing a Hollywood agent, that just don't track with me. In a way it reminded me of a smaller scale Auntie Mame, a film I hated. I don't hate Breakfast at Tiffany's, mostly because of Hepburn's performance, but it bugs me.

Of course, Breakfast at Tiffany's biggest sin is the performance by Mickey Rooney as Hepburn's upstairs neighbor, a Japanese photographer. It is a blatantly offensive stereotypical caricature, with Rooney wearing false teeth, squinty eyes, and a yellowed face that seems straight out of a World War II movie. He's not funny, and it reminds me of that Gilligan's Island episode where they come across the Japanese soldier that doesn't know the war is over. It's really that terrible.

Breakfast at Tiffany's, though it doesn't hold up well, still has charm, most of it provided by Hepburn, and also by the indelible song "Moon River," written by Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini, that won the Oscar that year for Best Song. But while watching the movie this time I noted just how often that song can be heard. But when Hepburn finds that cat, and the music swells, one can't help but feel the heartstrings tug, even if just a little.