Blake Edwards’ film adaptation of Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s opens with Holly Golightly gazing longingly in the famed jeweler’s window. She is holding one of those iconic paper cups of cheap New York deli coffee in her hands. Dawn is quietly breaking around her, and for all her cultivated glamour, she is utterly alone on that famed stretch of Fifth Avenue. (Years later, in Victor/Victoria, Edwards poses his wife Julie Andrews in the same position outside a cafe in Paris. Freezing, starving, and anonymous, Victoria, like Holly, is also hungry for richer nourishment, deeper meaning.) In Capote’s version, our heroine leaves us much as we found her, on the run. “Never love a wild thing,” indeed. In Edwards’ Technicolor reimagination, Holly and Fred end up kissing in an alley in the rain, the poor, nameless slob of a “Cat” in their arms. Hollywood demands happy endings. And Edwards, the jaundiced populist, did not shy from them. … Read More