Sabrina

Sabrina
October 1954
Paramount
Romance
VHS
B-

It took me awhile to sort out how I felt about this movie on my second viewing.  (My first was just a few months ago, when I bought the tape for a dollar.)  I think the problem is that while it's clearly in the romance genre-- it has moments of comedy and drama but it is primarily about who Sabrina will end up with and how-- the title question of the recurring song "Isn't It Romantic?" turns out to not be rhetorical.  To begin with, the three leads are all miscast to one degree or another, and the script (cowritten by director Wilder but based on an apparently very different stageplay) undermines them at every turn.

I know, you're going to say, "What, Audrey Hepburn miscast as the awkward girl turned glamour queen?"  The thing is, she's not actually much more glamorous after two years in Paris than she is before she leaves.*   She has a better wardrobe, a fluency in French, and a poodle.  There's a moment when she shows up at a party and the male guests have exaggerated jaw-dropped reactions that wouldn't look out of place in The Girl Can't Help It.  (No milk bottles overflow though.)  Now, I know tastes change, especially after sixty years, but the truth is to my modern eyes, Hepburn is a pretty girl yet one with fairy-like looks that would not be ogled at a distance of several yards.  Beyond that, there's an unpleasant undertone to her character, as if she's a less honest (including to herself) version of Monroe's gold-digger in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.  She pines for (almost stalks) David Larrabee for years, including when he's engaged (and possibly married, see below).  She almost commits suicide over him.  And then there's an implication that she becomes an elderly baron's mistress while in France.  True, she refuses bribes to give David up, but there's no question that part of her infatuation is with the Larrabee lifestyle.  Although I haven't seen a lot of Hepburn movies (I think this is the only one I own), usually (except in Breakfast at Tiffany's) her character doesn't have such an innocent surface with so much rot underneath.

Hepburn was 25 playing a girl of 20 and then 22, so at least she was well-cast by her age.  But then we have 36-year-old William Holden as David.  He was not too old for Hepburn, as they fell in love while making this picture.  His character, on the other hand, is presumably not past his mid-20s, as David kissed Sabrina when she was 9 and it would be creepy if he were then more than 11 or 12.  Yet he's somehow had the time by 1954 (his parents have been married 48 years, since 1906, so the movie is mostly set in the then-present) to attend several colleges and get married and divorced three times.  In fact, his second wife wore an Adlai Stevenson button to the wedding, so that must've been in 1952, when Sabrina was in or on her way to Paris, although no mention is made of this.  His third marriage would definitely have been while she was away, yet the household servants (including Nancy Culp, the future Miss Hathaway of The Beverly Hillbillies) keep shipping Sabrina/David.  See what I mean about an unpleasant undertone?  Also, he's a lazy playboy, and he's got the baggage of the unscrupulousness of Holden's characters in Sunset Blvd. and to a lesser degree The Moon Is Blue.

Then there is of course the colossal miscasting of Humphrey Bogart, as Bogie would be the first to agree.  He was 54 and had always looked old for his age, plus he was a few years away from dying of cancer.  In a different way than in The Band Wagon, I don't buy the older-man/younger-woman romance, because Hepburn is not the right sort of younger woman for Bogart.  (Lauren Bacall had a surface toughness and an underlying romantic side, which is sort of the inverse of Hepburn's steel pixie.)  His character of Linus Larrabee is at least old enough to have gone to college in the '20s (he has a phonograph with "Yes, We Have No Bananas," which was a hit in 1923), but there's never any explanation of why there's such a big age gap between him and his brother David.  (In the family painting, they look like they were children at the same time, with no more than maybe a five years' difference.)  Also, Bogart has his own screen baggage, as a tough guy, and while I could buy him as a self-made businessman, I can't believe him as a rich man's son.  (IMDB says Bogart's father was "moderately wealthy," but that's not his film persona.)  In great contrast to Holden and Hepburn, he and Hepburn don't have chemistry together.  The only reason why we're meant to root for him is because he's hard-working and wants to bring capitalism to developing countries so that they can have straight teeth and movies on Saturdays.

Say what?  This is where I remind you of who the writer-director is: Billy Wilder, a deeply cynical man, who not only gave us an obsessive romance in Sunset Blvd., but in Some Like It Hot would include a marriage-merger, like the one Linus is trying to orchestrate for David, until the chauffeur's daughter throws a monkey wrench into the business.  In Some Like, a made-up merger is Joe's excuse to get out of his lying affair with Sugar, and it's the antithesis of romance.  Here, Linus has a plan for David to marry the lovely Martha Hyer (not as sensible as in Abbott and Costello Go to Mars but again playing a girl whose engagement is threatened through no fault of her own).  This marriage will help Larrabee Industries (or one of their subsidiaries) produce a miracle plastic.  (And somewhere Mr. McGuire of The Graduate is taking notes.)  Hyer's character seems a bit shallow, but so is David, and it's not like he couldn't just divorce her quickly like usual.  (After all the paperwork is finalized of course.)  He does marry her in the end and Linus goes off to Paris with Sabrina, after trying to trick her into going there with David but then revealing his scheme because he's fallen in love with her himself.  This isn't Casablanca and the problems of three little people-- played by three big stars-- apparently do amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

Or do they?  I'll note that the other recurring song in the movie is "La Vie en Rose," which Sabrina explains means looking at life through rose-colored glasses.  But the main glasses in the movie are the champagne glasses David sits on, getting a literal pain in the ass.  He wants to write a love poem to Sabrina and asks Linus what rhymes with "glass."  Linus suggests "alas."

"Surprise!  There is no movie called Duck Soup!"-- Joe Adamson, Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Sometimes Zeppo (1973)

Billy Wilder has taken many disparate elements, some of which he couldn't have planned on, and subversively made them into one of the most unromantic romances ever.  For that alone, and because he's given me so much to think about, I'm giving the movie a B-.

Walter Hampden, who plays Oliver Larrabee, was the Aged Actor in All About Eve.  I couldn't spot Gregory Ratoff this time.  (Or Marion Ross for that matter!)  But, yes, that's Ma and Pa's Billy Reed, Emory Parnell, as Charles the Butler.  Sam Harris was in Citizen Kane and at least one other of my movies.  Ellen Corby, who's Miss McCardle here, was Miss Davis in It's a Wonderful Life.  (But she's best known as Grandma Walton.)  Marcel Dalio, who at 54 plays the 74-year-old Baron, was the magistrate in Gentlemen Prefer.

Chuck Hamilton was in Ma and Pa Kettle on Vacation and would be in There's No Business Like Show Business, which would also feature Ralph Brooks, again as a party guest.  John Williams, who's actually quite good (and well cast) as Sabrina's father, would go on to Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?  (I'm numbering him, to distinguish him from the composer and any other John Williamses we run into.)  Rand Harper would be in Auntie Mame.  Marjorie Bennett, who plays the cook and was the corset saleslady in MaPK at Home, would appear in Mary Poppins.  Francis X. Bushman, who portrays Mr. Tyson, was a silent-film star, so it's surprising he didn't appear in Sunset Blvd., but I do have his very last film appearance, in The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini of all things.


*We see much less of Paris than we did in Ma and Pa on Vacation or Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, just the Eiffel Tower out a window.  Bogart's character says that Paris is for lovers and that's why he stayed only 35 minutes.  Consider this a hint.

"Bogie, hold her like you've just met and wish you hadn't."