In 2011, American investment professional turned author Amor Towles released his first novel, Rules of Civility , which was on the New York Times bestseller list. I purchased it immediately, but read it only in 2018. Set between 1937-1939 in New York City, the novel follows the ascent of a smart young woman from Coney Island to the dizzying heights of Manhattan society. You could describe it as a pastiche of Whit Stillman’s seminal film Metropolitan (1990) and F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) with a dash of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860/61), a soupcon of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920) and a smidgen of Truman Capote’s novella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958).
Naturally, this set off a desire to see old New York on screen. I had recently watched Metropolitan again, and the films of all the other books mentioned, except Tiffany’s that I had seen only once in my teens on a grainy VHS. Also in 2011, Paramount had released a restored version of the film to commemorate its 50th anniversary that I had purchased on Blu-ray, and, like Rules of Civility was lying untouched. This mistake was rectified in 2018. Like many others, I was guilty of remembering Tiffany’s only for Audrey Hepburn’s impossible glamour, the jewellery store of the title and Henry Mancini’s Oscar-winning score, but the film is much more than that. Bowdlerised version of the Capote novella it may be, but in the hands of screenwriter George Axelrod ( The Manchurian Candidate ) and director Blake Edwards (the Pink Panther series), the film is about aspiration and a search for identity. And, for its time, it was quite bold. Hepburn’s Holly Golightly is a gold digger who accepts $50 cheques from lecherous men for visits to the powder room, while an older woman who routinely leaves $300 on the nightstand per visit keeps George Peppard’s Paul Varjak, who is an aspiring writer.
Despite the film’s glamorous setting, Axelrod’s razor sharp dialogue leaves us under no illusions about the harsh reality of Golightly and Varjak’s lives. The titular Tiffany’s appears only twice. Once, when Golightly presses her nose against the window at dawn on her way back from all night revelry, breakfasting on a coffee and danish, and again when she and Varjak wander in only to realise that they can afford nothing on their $10 budget.
Watching Tiffany’s again also made me realise that Pierre Salvadori’s Priceless (2006) is a clever retread of the 1961 classic. The setting is the French Riviera where Audrey Tatou is a brand conscious gold digger and bartender Gad Elmaleh is kept by an older woman.
Inevitably, Rules of Civility is set for a Hollywood adaptation. The writers entrusted with the task of bringing Towles’ glittering prose to the screen are Scott Neustadter and Michael H Weber, who gave us 500 Days of Summer (2009). Towles’ 2016 bestseller A Gentleman in Moscow is also set for adaptation as a mini-series to be directed by Tom Harper, who previously adapted Tolstoy’s War and Peace for television.
