Sabrina

“Democracy can be a wickedly unfair thing Sabrina. Nobody poor was ever called democratic for marrying somebody rich.” 

Billy Wilder began his American career as a writer-director with a  winning comedy. But the wartime mood turned him to darker stories, where he helped launch a filmic trend for edgy thrillers that would become known as film noir. He hit the bottom of that vein with 1951’s  Ace in the Hole, a vitriolic social critique in the middle of the HUAC witch hunt. A less popular, less outspoken director would have been investigated for anti-Americanism.

Wilder’s response was to run for cover, back to comedies derived from plays.  Stalag 17 mixed service jokes and cynicism, and earned an Oscar for William Holden. Once again on top of his game, Wilder followed up with a classy vehicle for Paramount’s new superstar. Audrey Hepburn was fresh from her starring debut in William Wyler’s  Roman Holiday.

Adapted from Samuel Taylor’s hit play Sabrina Fair,  Sabrina has the confidence of an unbeatable commercial hit. Audrey Hepburn was crazy about the Sabrina character; Humphrey Bogart was signed to play against type as a stuffy businessman. William Holden accepted a comic support role in gratitude for the break Wilder had given him four years before, on  Sunset Blvd..

Playwright Samuel Taylor would soon write the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s  Vertigo; twenty years later, he would provide the play source for Wilder’s  Avanti!  Following his break with screenwriting partner Charles Brackett, Wilder had collaborated with Lesser Samuels, Walter Newman, and Edward Blum; for Sabrina he tried writing with Ernest Lehman, who was then beginning a stellar career adapting books and plays to the screen.

The basic story is Cinderella refurbished to reflect the American class divide. The heroine Sabrina Fairchild (Audrey Hepburn) is a humble chauffeur’s daughter driven to distraction by the glamorous doings up at the Larrabee mansion, just a tennis court and swimming pool away from the garage loft she calls home. Sabrina forms a crush on David Larrabee (William Holden), a carefree playboy attached to the beautiful Elizabeth Tyson (Martha Hyer), his social equal. Depressed by her lot in life, Sabrina survives a thoughtless suicide bid thanks to the intervention of David’s older brother, the business-oriented Linus Larrabee (Humphrey Bogart).

To forget David, Sabrina is packed off to a cooking school in Paris, to learn a trade suitable for her station in life. She returns a new woman, utterly transformed by Paris fashions. To spend time with her, the flighty David ignores Liz Tyson, a choice that jeopardizes a Larrabee business merger. The all-business Linus Larrabee steps in to save the family fortune. He dusts off his Rudy Vallee- era dating paraphernalia and makes a play for Sabrina himself.

Our impressions of great pictures can shift over time. We find it interesting that the cooking school scenes we once thought hilarious — a trio of skits, really — now play as second-rate material. That’s not at all the norm for a Wilder picture. The impossibly corny jokes in his  One, Two, Three become funnier because they are so corny. Even the cruder bits in  Kiss Me, Stupid are still funny.

Wilder’s biographers tell us that his first introduction to English was through the lyrics of pop songs. Sabrina is dusted with vintage romantic tunes, emphasizing Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart’s melodic  “Isn’t It Romantic?,  which was introduced in the 1932 musical  Love Me Tonight. The story of Sabrina is set in 1954, but from what we see it could be 1925, an era of limousines, pampered millionaires, travel by boat, etc.. When Linus pulls out his old hat and phonograph to woo Sabrina, Linus Larrabee now seems more of an ‘old guy’ robbbing a cradle. Enough chemistry is present to generate Hollywood’s old romantic magic, but it needs to stay in a fantasy vein.

Humphrey Bogart received top billing. Opinions were mixed about his behavior on the set. Some sources say he was his professional, cooperative self, but more than one Billy Wilder biographer emphasized his discontent with his character, the story, everything. He called the script ‘a crock’; hearing about Wilder’s two year-old daughter, Bogart suggested that maybe she secretly wrote the screenplay. Wilder swallowed insults from nobody, not even a top star. He answered by telling Bogie to try that s___ out on his preferred directors, the ones he could walk all over, like Nicholas Ray!  ^*

Could Bogart have been unhappy because playing opposite Audrey Hepburn made him feel like an old fossil?  Bogart and Hepburn were 55 and 25, respectively, a 30-year gap. Was Sabrina filmed in B&W for economy, or to mask the fact that Bogart had one toe in the 19th century?

It was of course common for movies to pair older men with younger women. Hepburn’s next romantic star Fred Astaire was no younger than Bogart. The age differential between Hepburn and Gary Cooper in Wilder’s 1957 movie  Love in the Afternoon is a slightly closer 28-year split. But this time around many critics made age an issue, noting that Wilder’s cameraman used diffusion on Gary Cooper’s close-ups. We think what really irked the reviewers about Afternoon is Wilder’s indication that Hepburn and Cooper’s characters come very close to sleeping together. With the sex issue made more prominent, did uncomfortable reviewers read Cooper’s Frank Flannagan as a dirty old man?

Sabrina Fairchild: “All night long I’ve had the most terrible impulse to do something.”
Linus Larrabee: “Oh, never resist an impulse, Sabrina. Especially if it’s terrible.”

Sabrina is old-school Hollywood filmmaking, a slick studio production. Wilder’s highly polished screenplay leaves out most of his sour humor. There’s no acid-tinged dialogue, and no resentful hero calling everything he sees a fraud. The comedy instead pokes gentle fun at Long Island swells while promoting the fantasy that class barriers have no defense against true love — which certainly seems possible for anything involving Audrey Hepburn. The character of Sabrina offers Hepburn more variety than her breakthrough Princess role in Roman Holiday, and more opportunities to wear slick Edith Head fashion creations. She comes back looking like the cover of Vogue … quite an achievement for a servant’s daughter in Paris to learn cooking.

What would Lubitsch do? 

One key to Sabrina is Billy Wilder’s worship of the revered Ernst Lubitsch, whose elegant & witty romantic comedies had once defined Paramount glamour. Wilder took enormous pride in writing Lubitsch’s classic  Ninotchka. He applied his mentor’s lessons to much of his screenwriting, and many of his scripts have a pleasing Lubitsch-like formal symmetry. Jokes never have just one purpose. Anything funny enough to stay in a Wilder script is finessed like a running gag in a silent movie. The ‘decadent’ hat in Ninotchka returns several times in dialogue or in person, marking developments in Ninotchka’s romantic stirrings. Examples in Sabrina include a pair of champagne glasses that return to give David a royal pain. A sheet of super-strong Larrabee plastic returns as a special hammock to soothe David’s injured posterior. Sabrina’s father chides her for ‘reaching for the moon,’ an image already introduced in the film’s main title.

Wilder develops his motifs from film to film as well. Linus Larrabee’s hat, umbrella and copy of The Wall Street Journal are given to C.R. MacNamara in Wilder’s later One, Two, Three, to be exploited for instant political contrast with East German communism.

Linus Larrabee: “Paris is for lovers. Maybe that’s why I stayed only thirty-five minutes.” 

Billy Wilder’s films eventually came to be universally acclaimed, but his reputation had its ups and downs. Sabrina is one of the titles cited by critics that accused him of being a heartless cynic, and a misogynist who liked to torment his leading ladies. That rumor may have gotten started with  A Foreign Affair, when a nerevous Jean Arthur was convinced that Wilder favored Marlene Dietrich. Reviewers noted that several Wilder heroines suffer humiliations and suicide attempts, most notably Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment. The charges are unfounded, considering Wilder’s consistent commitment to romantic ideals. His heroines may endure psychological trauma, but they are always sympathetic and endearing, and they usually prevail.

Billy Wilder also got short-changed for his visual imagination, as applied to advanced storytelling. Sabrina has an excellent example of subtle graphic inspiration. At one point Sabrina takes an elevator up to a meeting with Linus, who we know plans to tell her he doesn’t love her. As Sabrina climbs upward, Wilder superimposes the numbered elevator lights over her body. When the ride ends, the top lighted number is left hovering over her heart, as a symbol of her vulnerability.

Linus Larrabee doesn’t burst into song when he rides a tugboat to catch up with Sabrina’s ocean liner before it clears New York harbor.  →  But could Isobel Lennart, William Wyler, or perhaps even Barbra Streisand have been inspired by Sabrina when formulating their musical montage for  Funny Girl’s show-stopper “Don’t Rain on My Parade?”  We wonder.