Many insights and connections arise just through the mere fact of choosing these three particular movies. If I dig in the right places, it should lead to me larger consequences...
So with each inkling, I plan to expand them into essaylettes to build around later.
In no particular order:
Apparel and Guise
1. The storyline of La Dolce Vita was said to have been inspired by Balenciaga's "Sack Dress" (1957) because "they rendered a woman very gorgeous who could, instead, be a skeleton of squalor and solitude inside" (Bondanella, Peter, The Cinema of Federico Fellini, 134)
2. Audry Hepburn's entire wardrobe in Breakfast at Tiffany's was designed by (then up and coming designer) Hubert Givenchy (though Edith Head was to design for the rest of the characters).
Secret Auteurs
3. Art Direction, Set Decoration, and Costume Design of both the movies To Catch a Thief and Breakfast at Tiffany's are the same main players (Hal Pereira, Sam Comer, and Edith Head respectively) despite being filmed six years apart.
Motifs
4. Cats. There are key scenes with them in all three movies: Holly Golighty's Cat, Sylvia's alley cat, the black cat on the roof as the burgler metaphor of John Robie.
5. Jewels. All of them revolve around the innocence and infamy of the values of the gemstone. The naivete and respect Golightly has for them, the means to an end for Robie in them, and the indifference of the aristocratic socialites have towards them in Dolce.
Site
6. The filming of each movie was both on location and built sets. The ratio of each varies amongst the films, but a mapping of each scene from each movie would result in an interesting diagram. Piero Gherardi was said to have re-created over 80 locations for Dolce including a portion of Via Veneto of Rome, the interior dome of St. Peters, night clubs...and on location at Bassano di Sutri and Trevi Fountain. For Breakfast, all exterior shots were on location in New York City and all interiors were at the Paramount Studios in Hollywood, except inside the Tiffany & Co. flagship of Manhattan. Thief won Best Cinematography and used the backdrop of southern France and the Carlton Hotel in Cannes. Paramount's VistaVision camera allowed for fast-moving vehicle and helicopter shots.
Words, Words, Words
7. The scripts of each movie are around 8,000 words each. I don't know what that means, except that none of them are dialogue-heavy. But perhaps a search of key words or other measurements will reveal something? There was thought of using the script as the base and all of the thesis builds on it through annotations in a (wide) side margin.
A Moment in Time
8. The works of Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills and what they can mean for the analysis of glamour and luxury in these three movies. "For her the pop-culture image was not a subject (as it had been for Walker Evans) or raw material (as it had been for Andy Warhol) but a whole artistic vocabulary, ready-made. Her film stills look and function just like the real ones—those 8-by-10-inch glossies designed to lure us into a drama we find all the more compelling because we know it is not real. " (moma.org)
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