Entertainment

The ‘Breakfast’ club

Fifty years after she first zipped up a little black dress, sang “Moon River” on her fire escape and ate a cruller outside New York’s most famous jewelry store, Holly Golightly still takes the tiara as one of the most iconic female characters in American cinema.

Which is weird, considering “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” which celebrates its 50th anniversary with a newly restored Blu-ray edition on Tuesday, is not considered to have a great script, great performances or even be a truly great movie. But try telling that to generations of American women. With a ditz’s brew of style, charm and kookiness, Holly still grips the American psyche as tightly as a velvet-gloved lady grasping a clutch.

“No one thing explains the unbelievable phenomenon of ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s,’ ” says film historian Sam Wasson, author of “Fifth Avenue 5 a.m.: Audrey Hepburn, ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ and the Dawn of the Modern Woman,” which tells the story of the making of the movie. “I would never say that it’s the greatest romantic comedy ever made, but it’s definitely the most popular. Women just go nuts for her.”

Hepburn’s portrayal of Golightly offers women an intoxicating blend of wholesome and harlot that was something new in 1961, especially for teenagers, Wasson says. Before “Tiffany’s,” they worshipped virginal Doris Day or lusty Marilyn Monroe. With Hepburn, they got both in a single character — and a stylish one at that.

“When you put her in the context of women in Hollywood movies at that time, you see Holly Golightly was a bold step in a progressive direction,” Wasson says. “She deserves credit for having sex and making it OK.”

In fact, Truman Capote, on whose novella the movie is based, wanted Marilyn Monroe to play Holly. In his story, she’s a far more tragic and calculating 19-year-old. But Monroe’s people nixed the idea of her playing a “lady of the night.”

Producers Martin Jurow and Richard Shepherd settled on Hepburn in part, Wasson writes, to help get the racy material past the censors. Good girl Hepburn, with her boyish figure and saucer eyes, allowed Americans to accept Holly as a lovable prostitute — the precursor to Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman.”

Hepburn also rejected the part as too transgressive, but Jurow and screenwriter George Axelrod chased her to France for a meeting. Jurow told her that if she didn’t see Golightly as the “cockeyed romantic she truly was, then maybe she was the wrong choice” anyway, Wasson writes. The ploy worked. Hepburn took the part, and turned Golightly into a cultural phenomenon.

As Golightly, Hepburn brought chic to the masses by wearing LBDs (little black dresses) with élan. Before Golightly, fashion was for high-class characters. But in “Tiffany’s,” a country girl from the sticks dripped with jewels and style. She’s spirited and opinionated, having shed her Lula Mae bumpkin identity to remake herself among cafe society. She’s also the epitome of independence, with her own apartment and money, and no one to answer to, not even her cat (which she refuses to name because they “don’t belong to each other”).

But she’s also kind of crazy. She spouts completely insane (and inane) things. (“It’s useful being top banana in the shock department,” she says.) She also leaves her husband and family behind to run to New York, where she escorts wealthy men all night and desperately tries to land the richest ones as a husband. And what’s so cute about a borderline alcoholic who constantly loses her keys, keeps forgetting what day it is and waters her plants with booze?

“She’s a gold-digging opportunist, possibly a little mentally ill, that the world fell in love with,” says AV Club film critic Nathan Rabin. “But she does it with style. And everybody loves Audrey Hepburn.”

Rabin, who coined the term “manic pixie dream girl” to describe the whimsical, nutty, hot chick that needs saving by the male lead — see Natalie Portman in “Garden State,” Kirsten Dunst in “Elizabethtown,” even Shirley MacLaine in “The Apartment” — says that this character type somehow translates as cute and eminently redeemable to American audiences.

They “act screamingly insane, and it’s supposed to read as charming,” Rabin says. “It feeds into this fantasy for young men that . . . they can have their lives transformed by this creature who looks like a human being but has very few recognizable human emotions.”

In “Tiffany’s,” George Peppard is the man who gets to redeem himself and Holly with a speech about freedom. “You call yourself a free spirit, a wild thing,” he says. “You’re terrified somebody’s going to stick you in a cage. Well, baby, you’re already in that cage. It’s wherever you go.”

In the final scene, the two embrace in the rain, clutching “Cat” between them. That moment is what gives the film lasting power, says seminal film critic Judith Crist. “To me, it is in no way a true love situation,” she says. “And holding the cat almost between them, to me, says — and it’s startling for a movie to say it at that time — that this was not a permanent love.”

To Crist, the movie works precisely because Hepburn isn’t playing the hooker with a heart of gold.

“I’m not so sure that [Holly has] a heart of gold at all,” she says.

scohen@nypost.com