Once Over Golightly

Breakfast at Tiffany's (Paramount). Holly Golightly, as Truman Capote described her in his peekaresque short story, was a sort of sophisticated migratory worker. She traveled from nightspot to nightspot, giving pleasure where she pleased, digging gold where she found it. Pleasure and pay never stood in a direct relation, but when Holly asked for powder-room money, she generally got $50.

Yet sometimes, thin and overdrawn, the poor child would come home from work in the whee hours of the morning with a wicked case of "the mean reds." For this condition, a sort of moral hangover, there was only one cure. She would take a cab to Tiffany's jewelry store and lay her head against the elegant little show windows. That ice felt so good.

For the first half hour or so, Hollywood's Holly (Audrey Hepburn) is not much different from Capote's. She has kicked the weed and lost the illegitimate child she was having, but she is still jolly Holly, the child bride from Tulip, Texas, who at 15 runs away to Hollywood to find some of the finer things of life--like shoes. At 18, she is established in a posh Manhattan flat and living off the fatheads of the land. The flat is furnished with a bathtub (sawed in half to make a sofa), a refrigerator (containing a pair of shoes), a telephone (in a suitcase), a pink cat (without a name) and a bottle of Scotch (for wetting Holly's whistle and Scotch-and-watering the flowers). And every Thursday. Holly dutifully goes up the river to Sing Sing, where she visits a darling old narcotics trafficker named Sally Tomato. She finds it perfectly sweet that Sally should pay her $100 a week to come talk to him for an hour, perfectly natural that he should want to send his lawyer a weekly weather report. Sample report: "Snow flurry expected this weekend in New Orleans.''

But after that out-of-Capote beginning, Director Blake Edwards (High Time) goes on to an out-of-character end. On the conventional but dubious assumption that every kook belongs in some nice guy's kitchen, he induces poor Holly to give up mattress money for matrimony. As the nice guy, George Peppard scarcely makes the alternative seem attractive --he has that I-went-to-college-but-it-didn't-do-any-good look of the sort of Harvardman who couldn't even get a job in Washington. And Audrey Hepburn, though she plays with fluent wit and gives the customers a spectacular fashion show, isn't really Holly. Holly isn't the sort of girl who wears her rue with a diffidence. Holly is the sort of girl who thinks that guilt is less valuable than solid gold.

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