the contrarian: Blake Edwards' "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1961)

I've come to realize belatedly that I really don't like "Breakfast at Tiffany's." For the longest time, I thought I did. I don't know why. Perhaps it's because I am so fond of Blake Edwards, its director, or because Audrey Hepburn, its star, was so singular and always so appealing.

It's a strange film - not really a comedy, not really a drama - and while the part of party girl Holly Golightly became Hepburn's signature role, she is wildly miscast in the film. The fact that, after nearly 50 years, people are still so beguiled by her in it says more about Hepburn's star power than the performance herself.

Aside from Hepburn, George Peppard makes a uniquely unpleasant leading man, and, in a performance that was something of a racist disaster even way back in 1961, Mickey Rooney is simply unwatchable.

If there's one aspect about "Breakfast at Tiffany's" that has repeatedly seduced me over the years, it's the film's gorgeous opening credits - Hepburn, dressed in diamonds and Givanchy, sipping coffee from a cardboard container and eating a Danish as she strolls outside Tiffany's on a curiously vacant Fifth avenue at dawn, while Henry Mancini's haunting "Moon River" softly plays on the soundtrack. Magic.

I can watch the film's titles over and over again. But the movie itself, I've come to discover, I can take or leave.

Sorry.

(Artwork: Poster from Paramount's "Breakfast at Tiffany's")

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