fanaticusanonymous

Even now 57 years after its original release, Breakfast At Tiffany's remains a charming love story between two hustlers of sorts. Audrey Hepburn is not the Holy Golightly that Truman Capote intended, she couldn't be but she was Audrey Hepburn in all of her 1961 glory. Amazing how it still works that Audrey Hepbun touch. George Peppard is gorgeous but impenetrable. Mickey Rooney, unforgivable. Henry Mancini, opportune but. strangely enough the character that fascinated me the most in my latest viewing is Patricia Neal. I would love to see a full movie about that woman. She exudes sensuality and smartness. Blake Edwards concocts a lighter fare from Capote's book and as it happens, it's still very much alive and surprisingly relevant.

Every frame, with Marlene Dietrich in it, is a masterpiece of lights and shadows. The artistic marriage of Dietrich and his director Josef Von Sternberg is all consuming and therefore we're trapped, happily so. Look at what the camera does with Dietrich's face when she delivers the iconic line: "It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lilly" I had to rewind immediately and see the moment again, one, two, three times. Dietrich is dressed, lit and photographed like a goddess, the human kind. I wonder if we're ever going to see the likes of her, the likes of them, ever again.

I'm not going to talk about the film as a film because, it seems to me, a pointless exercise. We all know the story. Painful, bitter, shattering. What we didn't know, what we couldn't even imagine is what was in Joe Paterno's heart in mind. Now we have a plausible, profoundly human version of it, in Al Pacino's eyes. I saw a decent man of his generation confronted by the new approach to decency. I saw in his eyes a sort of resignation, the kind of resignation suffered by the decent man who knows he's guilty. Al Pacino is still breaking ground, still at the vanguard of his own profession. Hurrah !