A few years ago, I read Truman Capote’s novella “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” and an hour after I’d finished it I watched the 1961 film adaptation, directed by Blake Edwards and starring Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly. I hated the movie: It sounded as if the actors were simply reading lines out of the book, and the alterations Edwards made to the script seemed blasphemous.
This is not the proper way, I have decided, to watch “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” It is, after all, a delightful movie in its own right – it’s hardly fair to compare anything to Capote’s prose. Hepburn flashes all her irrepressible charm, but she communicates quite a bit of repressed sadness, too. The tone of her character has changed slightly from the novella, but it’s one of Hepburn’s deepest performances. Considerably less deep is George Peppard as the writer Paul Varjak, who of course falls in love with Holly; Peppard is a forgettable actor, and he in no way seems Hepburn’s equal. Even Peppard, though, is infinitely preferable to Mickey Rooney as Holly’s upstairs neighbor Mr. Yunioshi, a shamefully ridiculed Asian stereotype.
But forget the men – this story was always about Holly Golightly, as if Capote knew that some day Hepburn would come by and immortalize that character. On Thursday at 3 p.m., head to the Santa Monica Public Library and watch her sitting on her windowsill singing Henry Mancini’s “Moon River.” You’ll fall in love with her all over again.