- YEAR: 1961
- DIRECTOR: Blake Edwards
- KEY ACTORS: Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard
- CERTIFICATE: PG
- IMDB SCORE: 7.6
- ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE: 88%
SEX SCORE: 1.5/5
❓I can only give this a half for rewatchability. It is rewatchable…but significant parts of it are so racist that it is very uncomfortable watching!
❌ While the 1960s styling is fabulous, I didn’t want to fuck the cast
❌ And it didn’t inspire fantasies. Hepburn is so transcendently beautiful that I can’t even really inspire to be that beautiful!
✔️ The sex positive question is tough, as usual. I’m going to say it is sex positive because of how the main characters date and live free and independent lives at a time when this wasn’t common, but it’s not perfect…
❌ And it does not pass the Bechdel test. Not many female characters who don’t often have names and, those that do, only talk about men…
As always, this contains spoilers so watch the film before you read on…
STREAMING: Paramount Plus, Amazon Prime (rent £3.49, buy £5.99), YouTube (from £2.49). For a full list of streaming options, check out JustWatch.com
When I was growing up, my mother used to tell me the plot of movies that I wasn’t yet old enough to see surprisingly often. As I write that, I realise how weird it is – especially when she spoiled the ending of Psycho, although I’d argue that the film is creepier when you know – but it did mean that I had an understanding of many classic movies before I ever saw them. And Breakfast at Tiffany’s is one of those films. My mother loved Audrey Hepburn and thought that she was one of the most beautiful people who have ever lived, and she used Hepburn’s filmography as proof of how wonderfully versatile she is – she can play everything from a naïve princess in Roman Holiday to a party girl in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Now, I would argue that Hepburn essentially plays the same character in each movie – a naïve but beautiful waif who is charming and wins over all the men around her as they fall over themselves to help her. She is a sheltered princess in Roman Holiday, she is similarly elegant in My Fair Lady when she’s ‘smartened up,’ and she may be all grown up in Sabrina but is still innocent to the ways of men and relationships, and her innocence and, dare I use the word again, naivety are her main character traits in Charade and How to Steal a Million, as she works with criminals and con artists. Maybe I’ve just not watched enough Hepburn movies, particularly from her later career, but then again, she only made five movies after 1967 so maybe there wasn’t much more to see…
But I don’t want this to take away from her status as a true Hollywood icon, perhaps even the greatest. It was this thread of beauty and elegance that followed her through all of her movies that made her a Movie Star rather than just an actor; a presence in the movie that gives more than just the sounds and images. Just as we now go to see a Tom Cruise movie with certain expectations, we see an Audrey Hepburn movie expecting to see that same grace and charm that we saw last time, in a subtly different framing device perhaps, but with the same joy and fun as she delivers whenever she’s on screen.
Audrey Hepburn is a fascinating woman – and one whose off screen story is probably more interesting than her on-screen persona. Born in Belgium and moving to the Netherlands during World War Two, she supported the Dutch Resistance against Nazi Germany by donating funds from ballet performances and delivering messages, because who would suspect a child? She has also claimed that her famous slender physique was due to becoming so malnourished when living in the Netherlands during the war. And, after her stellar career that began with 1954’s Roman Holiday – winning a Best Actress Oscar for her first starring role – through to the mid-1960s, she stepped back from fame to focus on her family, later turning her attention instead to charity work and became a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF in 1988: ‘I can testify to what UNICEF means to children, because I was among those who received food and medical relief after World War II. I have a long-lasting gratitude and trust for what UNICEF does.’
This later part of her life is as much a part of the legacy of Audrey Hepburn as any of her movies. It’s possible that she is the first famous person whose death, in 1993, I was aware of in real time as I remember seeing pictures of her in Ethiopia and on other humanitarian missions as often as I saw stills from her movies during the subsequent celebrations of her life. For me, her life outside of Hollywood added a poignance and fidelity to her light and joyful roles that shone from the screen. She wasn’t just a beautiful woman; she was a woman who had survived and fought and had earned her joy and beauty, and had chosen to share it with us through the screen as an actor and later used her privilege and platform to make genuine changes to other people’s lives to help prevent anyone else from suffering as she had. Too many people are called icons or legends, but Audrey Hepburn deserved that title.
I was pleased that Breakfast at Tiffany’s won the Hepburn poll last month when picking a movie of hers to explore as it is both exactly who she is and why I love her, and it is the closest that she really gets to something gritty and harder. Truman Capote, who wrote the original novella, famously tried to veto Hepburn’s casting in favour of Marilyn Monroe who he felt was more like his version of Holly in real life. Monroe, however, turned it down as she was worried about the impact on her reputation, which is a fascinating revelation about what the film could have been about!
Breakfast at Tiffany’s tells the story of Holly Golightly (Hepburn) and her friendship with upstairs neighbour and struggling author, Paul (Peppard). Golightly doesn’t seem to have a job or much purpose and instead flits from party to date to party, looking for a rich man to marry. Paul’s purpose is clearer but still euphemistic – he’s the kept man of a rich woman who supports him while he tries to write a novel. He forms a friendship with Holly and discovers that Holly isn’t her real name – she’s called Lula Mae and has run away from her husband who she married when she was 14. Golightly consistently struggles to maintain her independence, claiming that she and her cat, Cat, ‘belong to nobody and nobody belongs to us. We don’t even belong to each other.’ Of course, Paul falls in love with her and tries to rescue her when Golightly’s fragile existence falls apart and, of course, she tries to fight back and run away (as I would to anyone who told me ‘I love you, you belong to me!’) but, of course, she changes her mind and they kiss and the movie ends with a soaring soundtrack that makes you feel like everything will be OK.
Holly Golightly and Breakfast at Tiffany’s have become an icon or a symbol that is bigger than and entirely separate from the film itself. Guy Lodge in the Guardian described her as ‘more icon than character at this point, her signature little black dress, updo and cigarette holder now a recognised code – and costume – for cosmopolitan urban femininity even among people who have never seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s.’ She’s a symbol of independence, of young women living a high life of fun in the big city. She is every one of us who has moved to a new place and decided to reinvent ourselves as more glamorous or more mysterious and more interesting.
And there is so much to love about Breakfast at Tiffany’s – I love that Hepburn essentially wears the same dress with different accessories throughout the movie, I love that they could seriously consider buying something at Tiffany’s for $10, I love that there’s a ginger cat, and I love the 1960s glamour and style – but it looks more and more like a horror movie every time I watch it. Seeing it with 2024 eyes and sensibilities, I can’t shake a low thrum of unease and fear for Holly as she tries to stay ahead of the misogyny and danger that constantly threatens to overwhelm her. Is she care-free and a bit selfish as she flits around town, or is she simply surviving?
Who are all of these men and what are they expecting of her? Why was she hired to be a companion to a mobster in Sing Sing jail? And why does no-one express more shock that she got married at 14?! I had forgotten that, according to the movie, the problem with Holly’s past was that she was already married and didn’t tell anyone about it, not that she was a victim of a forced marriage to an older man when she was a minor. It doesn’t matter how often her husband emphasised how it had been her choice or how happy she was. The power dynamics do not allow her to make a truly consensual choice and the fact that she ran away suggests that she wasn’t that fucking happy!
And this darker tone that I now can’t ignore is much more in line with Capote’s original novella. Although it’s not explicitly stated, book Holly Golightly isn’t a party girl, she’s a sex worker. Capote has claimed that she’s more like an escort, calling her ‘a kind of “American geisha” there to entertain men with charm and conversation, not seduction’, but that feels like semantics. Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s was also not a romantic story. Peppard’s character, Paul, is simply a narrator and the book ends without their reconciliation as Golightly simply disappears. Capote wrote her as ‘a symbol of all these girls who come to New York and spin in the sun for a moment like May flies and then disappear,’ which makes it an entirely different movie. A young girl escaping to the big city from a child marriage and turning to sex work to survive before just disappearing is a tragedy. That girl is almost certainly dead now. She’s not the glamorous icon that Hepburn brought to the screen; she’s not aspirational or fun or joyful. And even though her performance is full of pathos, Hepburn’s Golightly isn’t tragic. Lost, maybe, but not devastated. I just don’t know that Hepburn could have played that kind of tragedy at that time in her career: ‘the symbol of Hepburn, an icon of subdued glamour and chic, transferred itself onto the character of Holly when the actor brought her to life in the film adaptation…As Holly, she is at her most desirable to watch – embodying both glamorousness and effortlessness, such as when we see her wake up and throw on an oversized men’s shirt.’
And I find it fascinating that Hepburn was able to play this character almost sexlessly. Her Golightly flirts and dates and does favours for men, but I can never really imagine those as sexual favours. It’s like she is unable to escape from the naïve and innocent roles that had so far defined her – even when playing an actual sex worker, she manages to make the character seem wholesome and almost chaste. Watching Golightly dodge danger on her dates, with that low thrum of unease getting louder as she climbs out of windows to escape overly amorous men, I’m afraid for her because jilted and frustrated men are terrifying but, to purposefully use dated and euphemistic language, I’m not afraid for her virtue. She’s escaping men who want to smother her in kisses and woo her with flowers and marry her and, even though in reality those men don’t really exist without the co-existing danger of sexual violence, there’s no sense of that on screen. I don’t know that I even noticed the danger when I watched this growing up, only that these men were a nuisance. It has taken a loss of my innocence and a better understanding of how ubiquitous violence against women can be and how little provocation men can claim as justification for it to really see the darkness in the Golightly character.
So it creates an interesting sliding doors moment to wonder what would have happened if Marilyn Monroe had been cast as Golightly. As Aimee Farrier wrote for FarOut, ‘if Monroe, who was consistently hyper-sexualised by Hollywood, had been cast, the characterisation of Holly would be completely different.’ And I do quite want to see that film, to see a more sexual and so more vulnerable Golightly. Less free and breezy, floating from an assignation with a convicted gangster to a date with a foreign nobleman without a care in the world, and more manipulative and desperate, perhaps. Or similarly naive and trusting, but less likely to be believed. I think that might be the key – I can’t imagine there are many actors who could play a character that regularly visits that mobster in jail and passes on obviously coded messages hidden in weather reports that bare no resemblance to the actual weather and could get away with saying that she didn’t know and she thought she was visiting a friend. Even though we know that she’s being paid to do it, we still believe that she’s been tricked and exploited, not that she’s party to the crime itself. Would we have believed Monroe in the same situation? Would we have believed anyone else?
Lodge, for the Guardian again, wrote that Breakfast at Tiffany’s may be ‘one of the great Hollywood examples of good literary adaptation yielding a fresh gift altogether, rather than a faithful, secondary evocation.’ The book and the movie aren’t the same story, and that’s OK. Capote wrote a sorrowful novella about a girl who burns so brightly and then is lost into the shadows, and Edwards made a poignant movie about a lost girl who needed to find purpose and safety – and, despite the independence that Golightly is famous for, that safety was found in the ‘right’ man.
For me, that dates Breakfast at Tiffany’s almost as much as the abominable yellow face of Mickey Rooney’s character, Mr Yunioshi. God, that has aged badly and makes this movie almost unwatchable now. Just disgustingly racist and really, really not funny. This movie could never be remade, but I would absolutely endorse a new cut that didn’t include him!
Breakfast at Tiffany’s makes me a bit sad, all in all, but I don’t think any other actor could have quite created that level of pathos and poignancy – this is Hepburn’s most famous and more iconic role for a reason. Holly Golightly may have been an inspiration for all young women, finding their place in a new city and seeking a glamorous escape, but she was also a bit of a warning. A reminder that we can’t really run from our past, can’t really make ourselves a new future. Not if we’re a single girl in the 1960s anyway. We still all need a man to save us, apparently…
NEXT TIME… The Idea of You
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