rsweet mood is irresistible.

 

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American innocence: Holly Golightly - played by Audrey Hepburn 

 

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Audrey Hepburn with George Peppard and Patricia Neal  

 

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Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s Photo: Courtesy Paramount

 

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Audrey Hepburn is caught between takes while shooting the film’s opening scene Photo: Courtesy Paramount

 

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The composer Henry Mancini teaches Audrey Hepburn how to play the guitar Photo: Courtesy Paramount

 

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Hepburn and the director Blake Edwards confer on a location shoot  Photo: Courtesy Paramount

 

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George Peppard and Audrey Hepburn are at the centre of the throng as filming brings traffic to a standstill outside Tiffany’s on 5th Avenue, New York. Photo: Courtesy Paramount

11:25AM GMT 19 Jan 2011

7 Comments

I sometimes wonder if sweetness has temporarily gone out of modern literature. You know: charm. It has never been very fashionable, and you have to look back to a novella like Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s to find the kind of sweetness that smacks of genius. The title has entered the language and the film is 50 years old this year. So how did it come about, this delightful little work, and how is it that this famous film, like few others, represents such a natural flow of American innocence? When we think of it, we smile, and smiling is everything in popular culture.

The first thing to say is that the original book was much tougher than Blake Edwards’s film. The main character, this nervous, stylish, party girl, Holly Golightly, was effectively a prostitute, a Manhattan version of Sally Bowles, the girl at the centre of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin stories, which later formed the basis of the musical, Cabaret.

Holly is not so much a character as a force of nature, a person who seems, in herself, to summon the spirit of an age and who flutters into our lives trailing nostalgia, the affectionate aroma of a common memory.