Breakfast At Tiffany's 1961 Movie Review

An entertaining comedy starring the gorgeous Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard
Breakfast at Tiffany's
US (1961): Drama
115 min,

Audrey Hepburn's Holly Golightly is a tad refined for a girl who lives so improvisationally (on the money men give her), but for about the first three-quarters of an hour, this picture, directed by Blake Edwards, has a fair amount of sophisticated slapstick comedy, especially at a cocktail party that ranks with the best screen parties of the era. If you've read the Truman Capote novella that the movie is based on (and even if you haven't) you may be dismayed to see things go soft and romantic. The film wanders, and Hepburn is forced to become too frail and too enchantingly raffish before it comes to its makeshift, fairy-tale end. The madcap Holly, with her attachment to a writer (George Peppard) whose apartment is just below hers, is, of course, very similar to Sally Bowles with her Isherwood, except that the setting here is New York not Berlin. Patricia Neal is amusing in the rather impenetrable role of an interior decorator who appears to be a lesbian but is also keeping Peppard. (It may be wise not to let the mind linger too long over that.) Mickey Rooney does a wild bit of racial caricature as the Japanese photographer who lives in the apartment above Holly's; it's the most low-down and daring thing in the movie. The cast includes Buddy Ebsen, John McGiver, Martin Balsam, Jos�-Luis de Villalonga, and Gil Lamb. The script is by George Axelrod; the cinematography is by Franz Planer; the song "Moon River" is by Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini; Hepburn's clothes are by Givenchy and Neal's are by Pauline Trigere. Paramount.