Fall 2014 #4: Breakfast At Tiffany’s (1961) - Blake Edwards

This may be the second time in my life that I’ve been tricked into thinking a movie is about breakfast when it’s really not. I mean… at least this time a character actually does EAT breakfast, and to give the movie’s credit it IS at Tiffany’s.

I guess I don’t know why I thought this was some weird movie where Audrey Hepburn throws elaborate breakfast parties, and I assumed her character’s name was Tiffany because I know nothing about jewelry.

Instead I got to see an amazing love story between Holly Golightly (played by Audrey Hepburn) and Paul Varjak (played by George Peppard). 

Holly Golightly is the eccentric socialite that embodies New York City in all of its classiness, elegance, and uncontainable energy. She regularly throws parties, knows all of New York’s richest men, and makes $100 a week by unknowingly exchanging coded information between an incarcerated mobster and his lawyer (which I’m assuming in 1961 is enough to afford a nice one bedroom apartment in Manhattan).

But Holly is not all that she seems, and the film gives off the idea that Paul is introduced as a means of rescuing her from her past and her own self-destructive future. I loved seeing Audrey as the independent woman, but somewhere along the way, Paul’s love for her becomes the only thing that’s going to save her from herself, and I don’t know how I feel about that.

I mean he REALLY loves her.

And the more Holly begins to be consumed by her past and her obsession with acquiring a rich husband, the more Paul becomes the “male protagonist” destined to save the damsel in distress. For example.

I had seen this gif here a million times, and I always thought, “Cool, what a nice feminist speech about how women are not objects to be owned by the men that love them.”

But Paul does rescue her from herself, and he does prove that her belonging to him is the best thing for her, because it means she will be loved and respected. It’s a weird dichotomy that I don’t know exactly how to interpret, the line between a woman needing a man’s love to complete her and a woman having the ability to decide that the man who loves and respects her is where she should be because she deserves to be loved and respected. 

Either way, Breakfast at Tiffany’s won two Oscars, for Best Score and Best Song. It’s a classic in every sense (despite the negative depiction of women and the offensive caricature of Japanese Americans). Also, Audrey has gone on the record saying it was one of her most challenging roles, since she was an introvert trying to play an extrovert. It’s also important to note that Truman Capote, who wrote the novella on which the film is loosely based, demanded that Marilyn Monroe be cast as Holly Golightly, but Paramount refused.

Day 6: January 8th, 2014: My Fair Lady (1964) - George Cukor

A lot of firsts this week! Last night: my first Audrey Hepburn movie. I can’t believe I’ve lived twenty years without exposing myself to this great actress. Actually now that I think about it, I saw the first five minutes of Roman Holiday a few months ago… too much narration.

So apparently My Fair Lady is just George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion but with singing? Oh my god I just looked it up and Pygmalion was the Greek guy who fell in love with a statue he made. I’m an idiot. Everything makes sense. Okay. So My Fair Lady is about a pompous, self-righteous, misogynistic elocution professor named Henry Higgins who takes a bet to turn a flower girl from the slums and pass her off as a duchess at an embassy ball. That girl turns out to be Eliza Doolittle, played by Audrey Hepburn.

In the beginning, Eliza is incoherent in her Cockney accent. Like literally, I wish there were subtitles. But Higgins makes a point of treating her like garbage, and the film continues its entire three hours with him seeing her as nothing more than what he calls “baggage." 

Yes. He is both of those things. But anyway, the movie is awesome because it’s just one of those classic movie musicals that makes you feel almost as if it’s a live show. The scene where Higgins tests Doolittle’s newly learned upper class accent out at the race tracks is probably the best.

But her process is not without its obstacles. Higgins is rude, aggressive, and stubborn. He works her almost to death in the beginning with hardly any results.

And un-ladylike Eliza is definitely entertaining to listen to.

That scream is her reaction to everything. So anyway. The film actually does make a lot of poignant statements about upward class mobility and the cyclical nature of an under-educated society, but I’m going to have to give most of that credit to Shaw. The film itself is very dazzling and entertaining without the statements about socioeconomic obstacles and intellectual inequality. Mainly because Audrey Hepburn.

Also I’d like to point out that Audrey Hepburn’s singing was deemed too rough for audiences to hear, so all of her singing but one song "Just You Wait” was dubbed. Which is always disappointing, and probably explains why she didn’t get an Oscar nomination. The film did win Best Picture though. Julie Andrews (who actually played Eliza Doolittle on Broadway) actually won for Best Actress that year for Mary Poppins, and then was nominated again the next year for Sound of Music. Can’t beat that.

Last point: My first ever experience with My Fair Lady and its plot came a whopping 10 years ago, in the Disney movie, Confessions of A Teenage Drama Queen. That girl… was her.