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Manhattan at dawn is a yellow cab in the glass desert, out steps Cinderella with paper-bag breakfast to see herself reflected amid the display diamonds. Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn), née Lula Mae Barnes of Texas, absconded child bride and Hollywood agent's concoction, "very lovely and very frightened." In the city of rats and super-rats, the aspiring jet-setter flits from one powder-room appointment to the next—a wispy call girl hoping to snare the Brazilian millionaire and become, in Sartre's word, "respectueuse". An Upper East Side brownstone is her sanctuary, her confidant is the novelist (George Peppard) with a swanky sugar momma (Patricia Neal) and no ribbon in his typewriter. The modish "real phony" and the blocked gigolo, "we're after the same rainbow's end," as goes the Henry Mancini tune. Truman Capote by way of George Axelrod, party and hangover and romanticism and desperation lustrously distributed across the widescreen by Blake Edwards. The playground of identity and pretense, complete with masks, leads to a rain-soaked cat in the alley. (Mickey Rooney's disprized turn as a splenetic Japanese pornographer is integral to the purposeful artificiality.) A cocktail soirée bridges Antonioni and Tati, with cigarette holder and pillbox bouffant and spilled drink in a signature Edwards gag. Hepburn's Holly bespeaks a study of The Philadelphia Story, a sham princess whose rebellion boils down to shoplifting at the thrift store. (As the ditched hillbilly husband, Buddy Ebsen has two sighing words for her before pulling away in a Greyhound bus: "So skinny...") The ring in the Cracker Jack box and coded reports out of Sing Sing, "would be good for some laughs." "I don't think so. This is a book that'd break the heart." The withering riposte is by Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol. Cinematography by Franz Planer. With Martin Balsam, José Luis de Vilallonga, Alan Reed, and John McGiver.
--- Fernando F. Croce |