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How others will see it. Despite the fact that everyone smokes and no one has a cellphone, Breakfast at Tiffany's is accessible even to those who normally eschew classic movies. The beautiful leads provide eye candy and human interest. Women will like it more, of course, and men will find sources of amusement, such as Peppard's pre-"A" team persona and Mickey Rooney's embarassingly racist caricature of a bucktoothed, bellicose Japanese man.
How I felt about it. Yes, Audrey Hepburn is lovely, although she could use a few pounds so that her parents can stop worrying about anorexia. Morally, she's not much to write home about. She doesn't want to work. She enjoys a decadent lifestyle. These seeming irreconciliable facts are resolved by $50 payments from "rats" to "go to the powder room."
Say what? $50 in 1961 money is equivalent to two hours service as a paid escort. This presumes, of course, she's not additionally having sex with these nameless, unseen individuals, whom she quickly ditches once they've forked over the money.
Peppard gets a different treatment. Is it because he truly cares for her? Or is it because he's remarkably good looking? We suspect the latter. She's getting a gigolo for free. But she still prefers tall, "dark," and handsome Jose, because he's wealthy in addition to merely being physically attractive.
But while Breakfast at Tiffany's is amoral, it does feature two moralists. One is Buddy Ebsen, who wants to clip the wings of his former trophy bird and return her to her outhouse-cleaning hillbilly roots. Where she "belongs." The other moralist is Peppard, a surprising source since he has spent the last few years as a male prostitute for Neal.
Give Peppard credit, however. Now that he's seen the moral light (inspired, of all things, by shoplifting with Hepburn) he is now too proud to perform further services for Neal, or even to take her thousand dollar bribe to regard Hepburn in the same way as Neal regards Peppard. The irony of Neal subsidising Peppard's affair with Hepburn is lost on Peppard, who now simply considers it all amoral.
But his zest for soul purity is unfulfilling if it cannot be shared. His mission is to convert Hepburn as well. It's better that she is exclusive to Jose, even if he is ashamed of her, than for her to take advantage of "rats" she plays hot and cold with.
But his real goal is to own her himself, forgetting that he can't afford her standard of living. Buddy Ebsen might not be her only abandoned husband for long.