Every so often, a film comes along that makes me think, ‘wow! I need a piss.’ This was one of those films; a film so great as to surpass greatness and end up right back round in mediocrity. Come with me on a magical journey through the history of movies ruining books. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll laugh again and cry some more. A close neighbour will drop by to see if you’re alright, concerned by the sustained fluctuation in loud moods, but you’ll be too heavily encrusted into the sofa to answer the door. Eventually the fire brigade will kick your wall through and use the jaws of life to extract you from the hardened meringue of three week’s faeces and as they check you into your new padded home, you’ll laugh and cry some more.
The Film needs little introduction; stop someone in the street and get them to list their eight hundred favourite films of all-time, and I guarantee you that Breakfast at Tiffany’s will be in there, somewhere between ‘The Godfather’ and ‘please can I go now’. It’s that big a film. It rewrote the rules on rule-writing, and catapulted its stars into varying degrees of financial success. Decades later, it is still acknowledged as one of the greatest love stories of all time, with the notable exceptions of Romeo & Juliet and anything with Meg Ryan. There are love stories and then there are love stories. This is a love story.
You know you’re watching an iconic moment in the history of human endeavour from the moment the opening credits finally dissolve. When Audrey Hepburn first wanders into view at six in the morning, shuffling at her underclothes to free the straw from her knickers and waddling around bandily from the reaming the night before, I confess that my heart skipped a beat. For one precious, hope-filled moment, I prayed that it might be the recurrence of a life-threatening heart-murmur that would excuse me from the balance of this ordeal, but sadly the palpitations subsided and I was forced to soldier on. In many ways, my heart was broken, but physically the left ventricle remained tragically uncollapsed.
Like all hopelessly romantic fourteen year old girls, when Hepburn came to the door wearing that gorgeous eye mask and those darling dangly earplugs, I knew I simply must have some of those of myself. I wanted them so badly. Imagine not only how fetching I would look, but how much less of this sensory onslaught I would have to endure. If they’d just do some Tiffany nose plugs to block out the acrid stench of terrible acting, then I would have been perfectly anaesthetised to undergo the procedure of subjecting myself to this bilge.
Set against the backdrop of shameless sixties brand placement deals, the film follows Holly Golightly, a loveable anorexic prostitute who lives out of a suitcase and Paul ‘Fred’ Varjak, a failing writer and succeeding cunt. There’s a party and a jewellery store and some imaginative props and the two of them reluctantly skim-read a badly-written script that culminates in a dramatic anticlimax that left me toying with the concept of assisted suicide.
Holly, played by Audrey Hepburn, is the predecessor to the delightful ‘it girls’ that stalk the nether-regions of our Sky packages, picking off roles in futureless programs on channels with strange names. She burns the candle at both ends, commonly known as melting it, subsisting on the generosity of rich gentlemen who seem to pay her fifty dollars to go and have a shit. I didn’t quite get that part. Maybe if I had concentrated on listening to the film, instead of rubbing the tray of peanuts into my eyes to elicit an anaphylactic shock and generate an excuse, then I would have understood. Nonetheless, the part suits her down to a t, whatever a t is.
She cuts a stunning figure in her little black dress, which she wears so much better than the mannequin it was stored on that, despite it’s superior acting abilities, they were forced to strip it of the part.
Audrey, the daughter and niece and clone of Katherine Hepburn, spent much of her youth in a long glass tube. Many commentators have commented that this may have given rise to her pencilesque appearance, although several attributors have since attributed that to her disinclination to consume food.
Interestingly, sometime after childhood she made the questionable leap into young adulthood, taking on the roles as teenager, young woman and middle-aged lady. Critics at the time criticised this move heavily, correctly predicting that she would go on to play older and older roles, and eventually wind up being cast as dead.
Fred is a different matter altogether. George Peppard portrays the young, ‘kept’ toyboy of a wealthy female benefactor; a writer and member of a crack commando unit, sent to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune.
A ‘kept’ man is basically a gigolo, worded more politely; essentially a man-whore. She houses and feeds him, clothes him in tweed and keeps him in gaudy ornamentals, and in return he gives her the seeing to that her ageing workaholic husband is unable to deliver. Sounds like a sweet gig. But so does acting in a film, and somehow Peppard manages to balls that up too. I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to sympathise with his character or axe him into manageable logs for my wood-burning stove. I was largely outraged by his performance, which seemed to have been phoned in over a poor connection, and promptly added him to my fast-growing list of future victims. In a former life, I might have seized a pitchfork and chased this man from his career, but sadly the whole tragedy played out before I was even an odourless fizz in my mother’s unguarded daiquiri.
However, this hideous impression of a wooden kung-fu dummy was not the most uncomfortable nod to oriental culture in the film. That prize goes to Mickey Rooney, best known for his role in Pete’s Dragon, showing us all why he deserves a half-century career in the world of serious professional acting. As we all know, Japanese people are basically Western people with gigantified gnashers and a perpetual squint. The character props apart the sleep Ms Golightly interrupts with a succession of slapstick tea-based rituals and hilarious acts of spatial unawareness. Mr T was sadly absent from this episode; set in New York, the role would have required him to get on a plane, something he was at the time not prepared to do. Fool. Add to this the loveable paedophile, Doc Golightly, and you’ll see why this is a film to be treasured.
The story itself is quite slow to get going, and doesn’t really hit its stride until 115 minutes in, when the credits end and you get to watch something else. The best part is probably about ninety minutes into the feature when you realise that this film is still fucking happening. Other highlights include the food I ate, the wine I drank and my trip to the toilet midway through, which afforded me the chance not only to evacuate my colostomy bag, but also to cry for some time in the cold porcelain bath.
Visually, this is quite a lean piece. In line with its tender exploration of oriental immigration, a 
number of subtle contemporary techniques are employed by the director, whose name escapes my inclination to remember it. Lens flare stereoscopy features heavily in the earlier scenes, with the crew opting to use cameras for the entire film, a clever counterpoint to the rather brazen use of actual humans in some of the close-ups towards the end. A number of other firsts were notched up on set; it’s worth mentioning that before this film, dolly gripping as an art form was largely derided. Newspapers would openly mock those involved in it and women were known to turn up at the house of local dolly-grippers, to hand them a white feather or defecate through the sun-roof of their car. That all changed with Breakfast at What’s-its-name, which maintains a vice-like grip on the dolly throughout. I have not seen a dolly gripped this hard since the last time I orphaned a child.
Sadly, all this was not enough to save the film from purgatorial cinematic inadequacy. It was grey enough to have a measurable impact on my sense of hope and so long that I forgot what colour was.
That’s not to say I didn’t like it, although I didn’t, but nonetheless, I could have were it not so relentlessly shit. In truth, it was a joy to watch and made a welcome change to the endless loop of hostage beheadings that normally circulate my spank bank. I was grateful for the break. Where else do you get the chance to hear ‘Moon River’ instrumentally regurgitated for the best part of two hours? Indeed, I have spent the last four weeks riding round Los Angeles in a Transit lined with bin-bags, trying to find those accountable for this film, so that I can properly thank them in the sound-proofed environment of my windowless van.
So. should you watch it? Why should I care; I don’t even know you. How about you make your own mind up, instead of hanging around life, waiting for someone else to tell you how to make it good? Sure, you could watch this film. You could go skinny dipping in a tub of cutlery and bury your firstborn in a leper colony. Doesn’t mean you should. And personally, as long as I have a staple gun and room on my feet, there will always be a better option.
