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Credits relegation is the largest problem that films have fallen into, but it’s not the only one. Starved for time to filter in dialogue, directors have relegated the requisite power ballads to the ends of the movies, and therefore the song doesn’t have the same sort of association with the viewers’ opinion of the movie if the film had played during the movie. Take “Dreams” from House of Flying Daggers, a song which plays exclusively over the credits-it’s a terribly moving song, gloriously straining, but you don’t hear it until the director’s name shoots across the screen. It would have been magical playing during one of the many bids farewell, a fitting ode to the love lost in the movie, but instead most people will never hear it, as they’re exiting to the parking lot.

This isn’t to say that songs shouldn’t run across the credits, it’s just that we need it in the movie too.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s, one of the finest and truest romances moviegoers have ever been treated to, will eternally go hand-in-hand with Henry Mancini’s “Moon River,” and with good reason: the song never lets the plot alone. It’s there at the beginning of the movie, watching Audrey Hepburn shop at her beloved boutique, it’s there on the balcony, being heard by an obviously smitten George Peppard, and it’s there once more, as the entire world stops to find a cat amidst the rain. The song itself becomes a character, its lyrics instructing the audience that these two drifters are “huckleberry friends after the same rainbow’s end.” The song itself is impossibly beautiful (for those of you out of touch with film music, there is no one who can equal the poetic grandeur of Mancini), but its illustrious prominence in the movie is what gains its legendary quality.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s also differs from the majority of today’s films by daring to let its star sing. Audrey, an untrained voice, takes a huge risk and sings the part herself, something almost no star will do outside of a musical. For the twenty million dollars that they’re being paid, you’d think we could get a little tune-carrying out of them, but few stars chance it. Imagine how much better something like The Aviator would have been if Cate Blanchett had hummed out a forties diddy or if Jim Carrey had belted out a creepy funeral march in Lemony Snickett. Bill Murray croaked out a stanza of “More Than This” for a handful of seconds, and created the most memorable scene in an unforgettable movie-by letting their guard down, a star can appear vulnerable and reach out to the audience in a way that spoken word cannot. Humming on the way out, the music sticks out and keeps you locked in the reels of the film, entrenched in the characters melodic pleadings.

So, if by some miracle you hear some actor crooning when you sit alone in the darkened theater, embrace it, treasure it, savor it-soon it may be a faint film memory. But just remember, whenever you feel down on the movies, waiting around the bend is a place you’ll “be crazy about, called Tiffany’s.”