Posted 8/31/2010 08:04:00 PM by Douglas

I've never really liked the highly overrated movie, Breakfast at Tiffany's. It didn't make the sad story of a prostitute in New York any more palatable because she looked like Audrey Hepburn. It's still a sad tale.

The witless dawning in the film of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, by contrast, is that you are ready to be an East Side prostitute if you can look, and dress, and sing like Audrey. And Audrey, for all her charms, was not just a virgin, she was a Crackerjack virgin, done in life-like plastic, but engravable. She was about as real as Shirley Temple, and as huggable as Lassie.

Lassie wasn't the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the movie, but I get where this is going.

But Mickey Rooney got not so much as a sniff for his hideous rendering of a Japanese character upstairs. Wasson makes it clear that George Axelrod was horrified by Rooney’s caricature. It was director Blake Edwards who liked it. Afterwards, no one was happy. Rooney’s performance remains a startling revelation of American attitudes in the “hip” Kennedy era, and a disgrace. But the film’s treatment of the whore character, and of women in general, is only a little less vulgar and deluded.

I never read the book. I never will read the book. That character is forever claimed by Audrey Hepburn's dazzling beauty, no matter how ugly the story is.