Breakfast at Tiffany's

Truman Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe for the part; she turned it down after Lee Strasberg warned such a character would damage her image, and Capote later said Paramount had gone behind his back. George Axelrod’s screenplay turns the book’s unnamed gay narrator into Paul Varjak, who falls in love with Holly in Blake Edwards’s film. That single change builds the skeleton of the picture: a friendship becomes a romance. Paul’s own position is no different from Holly’s, since the writer is kept by the wealthy woman who installed him upstairs. Where the film comes closest to judging Holly over money, its narrator sits inside the same arrangement. Moon River came close to being cut: after a cool preview the Paramount executive Martin Rackin asked for it to go, and Audrey Hepburn objected fiercely. The film took five nominations and won two: Henry Mancini in what was then the score category for a dramatic or comedy picture, and Moon River for song. The nominations for Hepburn, colour art direction and adapted screenplay did not convert. A good fit if you read the film through that pairing, the narrator bought as surely as Holly is. Not for anyone who cannot carry the racial caricature Mickey Rooney plays as Mr Yunioshi; Edwards said years later he would give anything to recast it.