10 Classic Movies Ruined By Just One Scene

1. Breakfast At Tiffany’s Yellow Face

Otherwise hailed as a classic, Breakfast at Tiffany’s is proof that what constituted as comedy 50 odd years ago is often grossly outdated today and its problematic nature is not limited so much one singular scene but in fact every scene featuring white, American Mickey Rooney as Holly Golightly’s Japanese upstairs neighbour.

In one of Hollywood’s most embarrassing portrayals of yellow face to date, Rooney appears bucktoothed with squinted eyes sporting a hachimaki headband and one of the most ludicrously stereotypical Asian accents ever heard in a cartoonish caricature not too dissimilar to the USA’s anti-Japanese propaganda campaigns during World War II.

As ‘funny’ as that may have been back in the early 1960s, it seems viewers today are not so taken with the joke with public screenings of Breakfast at Tiffany’s recently sparking protests in California and New York and Paramount Pictures even going so far as to release a companion documentary, Mr. Yunioshi: An Asian Perspective, recognising the character as racially offensive in a DVD release of the film.

Which other ruinous scenes belong on this list? Share your own suggestions below in the comments thread.