A stylish, simply yet elegantly dressed young woman steps in front of Tiffany’s on an empty New York street. Large, dark glasses cover her eyes, a tiara sits upon her frosted beehive, she is dripping pearls, and her slim, long black evening dress perfectly matches her black sandals. A soft, sweet song evokes a mood of melancholy yearning as the golden light of dawn washes over the scene. When Audrey Hepburn watched her reflection in that shop window in 1961, she set the entire tone and look of a movie and created a character that would come to inhabit the minds and hearts of the public for decades to come.
Truman
Capote’s novella “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” first published in the November 1958
issue of Esquire, was adapted by
director Blake Edwards and writer George Axelrod with a light touch. Dealing
with comedy, romance, and poignancy in a swanky Upper East Side setting, the
movie follows Holly Golightly, a charming, carefree, independent New York party
girl, and her upstairs neighbor, writer Paul Varjak (George Peppard). While the
film hews closely to its source material for the most part, maintaining much of
the pungent, comical, racy dialogue (with some lines tuned down to Production Code
standards), the few liberties it does take are not insignificant. The tone of
Capote’s story was harder and more cynical; Edwards makes it soft and
sentimental, bestowing upon it a Hollywoodized happy ending, dropping some
characters and adding others, and turning the subjective point of view of the
novella objective, and its narrator, a dispassionate admirer and friend, into a
romantic interest.
***This is not a review of the film, but a comparative analysis of the Capote’s novella and its screen adaptation, and it contains spoilers.
