What started out as a seedy and truncated tale of a would-be New York socialite in print, turned out to be a much grander and unforgettably intoxicating film. Truman Capote seems to have been going for a Holden Caulfield with a crush, with the original short story. Anybody that's read the novella, definitely comes away feeling that Capote was reaching for the literary stars with it, but in an all too obvious way. Equally reaching though, was the screenplay adapted by George Axelrod, a Hollywood scribe who hadn't yet written his big hit, and surprisingly followed this film up with the much darker `Manchurian Candidate'. But strangely, and for the fortune of a fool, it works, and it works well ... and in both mediums. The story and the film are unconventional in its time, place and alongside its peers.



Audrey Hepburn was, in my mind, in an even greater classic film: `Charade', with a much more endearing performance as well, but most of us will always remember her as Holly Golightly with the orange cat. Holly seems like the girl that a lot of men would want to be with but won't admit. The proposition she puts to the book's Mr. Bell is to:



"Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell ... That was Doc's mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That's how you'll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky."



Holly was a contrast of a character for a time now vanished, when women were supposed to be less than their parts and quiet, too. Holly was anything but the locked-in house-frau of old America. In both versions, her past, `Doc', comes to pull her away from her independent life and remove her to lesser experiences and lesser moments, lost and wasted on an older man's desire.



Maybe Capote was saying much more than what we've given him credit for with Breakfast at Tiffany's. Maybe he was really speaking about the longing of the soul, the desperation of will, set deep within a person almost unreachable, untreatable. Maybe he was speaking to all women; women feeling carefully stitched into unbelievably cruel and untenable situations like a fourteen year old wife to a much older man on some far away farm. Or maybe he was speaking to all men. Men, who are in grey moments fading fast and isolated, wanting to reach out for some young beauty, some young prize to remind them of someone else, also long faded; older men that would wreck a young girls life unknowingly, just to fill an unquenchable need.



It's difficult to say what Capote was thinking and what he was shooting for. But watching the film and reading the book, the underlying theme is hard to block out and ignore. Hopefully, I'll keep the youthful indifferent perspective of a Paul Varjak, and not the lustful and slobbery gaze of a Doc Golightly or a Rusty Trawler.