Film Reviews by MS

Breakfast at Tiffany's is an extremely sanitised and boring film about a writer being inspired by his manic pixie dream call girl neighbour, with all the life and danger drained out of it, like a sort of Disney version of Nights of Cabiria/Sweet Charity. Capote's book on which the film is based, was itself is a rip off of a much better novel on this theme, Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, which gave us Cabaret.

It's all so bland, safe and euphemistic, you really have to watch the implied story you're not actually being shown on screen to get anything out of it. The lead actors are uniformly poor, including Hepburn, who was a fine actor in many films, but this is one of her weakest performances. The only standout actor is the cat, which enlivens every scene that it's in, jumping about on command in a way that's truly impressive to anyone who's every tried to get a cat to follow instructions.

A note on Mickey Rooney's now notorious 'comedy' performance as a Japanese neighbour (which is exactly as bad as it sounds). There is now a disclaimer with the film that the film "includes outdated attitudes, language and/or cultural depictions that viewers may find inconsistent with contemporary values" which is selling the 1960s short, as his performance was criticised for being racist at the time. Even before the film was released, Hepburn to her credit apparently offered to reshoot his scenes with a different actor.

Other than Hepburn's outfits, Moon River (which is a great song but makes no sense in the context of the film), and some nice 1960s Manhattan locations there is little to recommend in this film.