The trouble with cinephiles

Edmund Wilson once remarked, apro­pos his soon-to-be-sundered friend­ship with Vladimir Nabokov, that he felt for the great author “warm affec­tion some­times chilled by exas­per­a­tion.” That phrase springs to mind some­times when I read my pal Richard Brody. Aside from being an unfail­ingly kind and gen­er­ous per­son, Richard’s also a crit­ic and cul­tur­al enthu­si­ast of incred­ible viva­city and per­cept­ive­ness. But my, can he some­times say the darned­est things. 

I am grate­ful, for instance, for the canny, eru­dite dig­ging that led Richard to a dishy inter­view with Shirley MacLaine in the German paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and his trans­lated quotes from that inter­view. But my exas­per­a­tion sets in when he dis­cusses the fact that MacLaine turned down the role of Holly Golightly in Breakfast At Tiffany’s. MacLaine says she would­n’t have done as good a job as the 1961 film’s actu­al star, Audrey Hepburn. Richard begs to dif­fer. “I think she’d have been much bet­ter. What’s utterly implaus­ible in Hepburn’s per­form­ance is the back­story; MacLaine would have been per­suas­ive as the former Lula Mae Barnes and Doc Golightly’s fugit­ive wife.”

Well, indeed, she might have. In a dif­fer­ent movie. And by that I don’t even mean the dif­fer­ent movie that Breakfast At Tiffany’s neces­sar­ily would have been had MacLaine played Holly. No, I mean a movie rather entirely dif­fer­ent from Paramount and adapter/director Blake Edwards’ con­cep­tion of it. Part of that con­cep­tion being that it’s a movie in which Lula Mae Barnes is nev­er seen. I haven’t read any accounts of the mak­ing of the film in which the issue is dis­cussed, but it always seemed to me that part of the power of the rev­el­a­tion of Holly’s past, and part of what makes Buddy Ebsen’s single, lonely scene (and an exquis­itely per­formed scene it is, of course) in the film so power­ful, is how it pre­serves the Hepburn por­tray­al of Holly, a clear case of how Screen Presence=Character, while at the same time chal­len­ging the audi­ence’s per­cep­tion of her. Whether or not Hepburn “is” or could have made a “plaus­ible” Lula Mae Barnes is not the point. Edwards’ geni­us in hand­ling the mat­ter is in ask­ing the audi­ence to make an ima­gin­at­ive leap: that is, to pic­ture the poised, insouci­ant but also sad and, in the word of the char­ac­ter so delight­fully incarn­ated by Martin Balsam, “phony” Holly as a bare­foot and pos­sibly even preg­nant teen bride. The view­er may go as far as he or she wishes in this exer­cise; and wheth­er you take it to an ad absurdum level or don’t even both­er to men­tally limn the dif­fer­ence, noth­ing detracts from the believab­il­ity (which is, I might add, some­thing entirely dis­tinct from the rather banal “plausibility”—there’s a good reas­on Alfred Hitchcock, a dir­ect­or recalled with fond­ness by MacLaine in the inter­view Richard cites, had a dubi­ous atti­tude to view­ers who relied too much on said qual­ity) of Hepburn’s por­tray­al, from what is so actu­ally and gor­geously there on the screen whenev­er she fills it. 

I remem­ber once, in the midst of a multi-format spat/discussion of the Duplass broth­ers’ use of zooms in Cyrus, Richard say­ing that the zoom was an “expres­sion of the film­maker­’s desire.” I think some­times we cinephiles and crit­ics have a tend­ency to under­es­tim­ate the extent to which film­makers gauge, and hon­or, the desire of the audi­ence. I think Blake Edwards’ use of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is an abso­lutely stel­lar and still excep­tion­ally reward­ing example of that. As for MacLaine, I love her too, but I don’t blame her for not tak­ing the Holly Golightly role, and one rationale for her refus­al may be inferred by look­ing at her filmo­graphy in the late ’50s and early ’60s. So I’ll end by say­ing that had Ginnie Moorehead dodged that bul­let, ditched that mopey Dave Hirsch when he failed yet again to com­plete A Great American Novel, and caught a bus to New York, well, she coulda giv­en Holly Golightly a run for her money.