Breakfast at Tiffany's
(1961) Like the cat she carries on her shoulders, the jet-age courtesan Holly Golightly seeks shelter without work, and love without responsibility. The song "Moon River" sums up this film about an outpost of scroungers in Manhattan during the Kennedy era. As Golightly, Audrey Hepburn is elfin enough to eclipse the more troubling memories of the film: Mickey Rooney done up as a Japanese and George Peppard, bland as mayonnaise itself. (Plays Jan 12 at 7 and 9:30pm and Jan 13-14 at 4, 7 and 9:30pm in San Jose at the California Theatre.)

North by Northwest
(1959) The grandfather of the James Bond adventures, with ever-traveling hero, gentlemanly villain and untrustworthy woman—and smashing set pieces scored to ominous music (Bernard Herrmann, here), music that's like a whole separate layer of the film. When an ad man stands up at the wrong moment at the Plaza Hotel, he's mistaken for one Irving Kaplan, an American superagent; from this point on he's pursued by agents of the spymaster Van Damm (James Mason at his silkiest). The movie summed up Alfred Hitchcock's American films, according to the director. Those sniffing around the subtext of Hitch can find some meat in the Taming of the Squire sequences, in which the suave ad man, Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant), gets treated by Eva Marie Saint like a trick who won't leave. (Plays through Jan 11 at 7pm in San Jose at the California Theatre.)

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