Breakfast At Tiffany's

Strange to think that Truman Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe for the Holly Golightly role in Breakfast At Tiffany's.

Audrey Hepburn makes it so much hers, the minute she starts mooching down Fifth Avenue at dawn in the evening gown of the night before, nibbling a pastry, focusing on the baubles in Tiffany's jewellery window - left on display, improbably, overnight.

The scene turns cupidity into a childish daydream, in much the same way that the ads at the time sold sexy Maidenform bras by picturing ladies wearing them walking insouciantly through crowds in broad daylight.

The Givenchy gown, the black satin gloves, the black pineapple of a hair-do give this world-famous sequence - a good deal rarer in 1960 than it subsequently became when every telly ad copied it - the comic dissonance with reality that the film needs if it's to succeed as a bittersweet romance.

After this surreal entree, no one could possibly think anything bad about Holly Golightly - which had been Hepburn's worry when she agreed, under pressure, to take the part. She knew she needed a film to speed her transition to roles with a newer take on the permissiveness of the Sixties than her screen innocence had been used to playing. But she worried.

Holly was a kept girl, sweet but mendacious. And men who gave her money didn't mean it to be a tip for the cloakroom attendant. Probably Monroe's total self-absorption would have helped acquit Holly Golightly of any mercenary taint. But Marilyn would have looked so carnal that director Blake Edwards would have been hard put to make Holly's predatory nature appear like a charming aberration.

Audrey managed to do that, crooning Henry Mancini's 'Moon River' to herself sitting on the fire escape in a way that sums up the party girl's wistful yearning for rural purity.

She sanitises the film in a way that makes you forget its parasitical obsession with greed and exploitation. Everyone in it, including Holly, is living off someone else. This applies even more seriously to George Peppard, playing a kept man, or what would soon be called 'a toy boy', attached by the purse strings to Patricia Neal's older (and richer) woman.

He's a sort of 'midnight cowboy' without the spurs, able to make himself personable to men, women and the tutti-frutti in between. Hepburn becomes more of a den sister than a lover to this sexually ambiguous gigolo. For the first time, too, she was playing opposite a male co-star of about her own age, which made it hard for her to project her familiar persona of an 'elfin sprite' or 'adorable child' whom older men like Gary Cooper or Humphrey Bogart pursued but never really got to grips with.

Audrey plays the Little Girl Lost so well in Breakfast At Tiffany's that one doesn't bother to ask oneself what it is she feels lost without - the answer, though, is rich men. She makes promiscuity intangible, and thus pardonable.

Breakfast At Tiffany's
Cert: PG