Sabrina (1954, Billy Wilder) (Patreon)

49/100

Second viewing, last seen 1993. So here we have a film in which I dislike (or at least feel a pronounced lack of respect for) all three principals, to some degree. Which would be fine were this one of Wilder's ultra-cynical curdled comedies—Kiss Me, Stupid makes me giddy, and those people are all awful—but we're clearly meant to consider everyone thoroughly redeemed and admirable by movie's end, and I simply do not. More specifically, I don't buy the Larrabee brothers' joint reversal in the home stretch, both prongs of which play like desperate-writer's fiat. Linus falling for Sabrina despite himself might have worked with, say, Cary Grant in the role; Bogart's far too credible here as the consummate industrialist tycoon (the film's funniest shot has him demonstrating the new plastic's flexibility, bouncing away in the distance through a glass door), never providing any tangible sense of a heart being gradually melted by innocence. Even less persuasive is David's climactic shift into selfless nobility, which arrives from absolutely nowhere, in part because Holden leans so hard into the character's callowness that it's hard to credit this dude with possessing even the most rudimentary theory of mind. Only a Broadcast News-style ending (minus the epilogue, please) in which the woman winds up choosing neither man would have been satisfying, and Wilder, so often willing to ignore/subvert audience expectations, was just the filmmaker to provide it. Not sure whether he and Lehman are to blame, or whether the trouble stems from Sabrina Fair (which I've neither seen nor read), but the sheer creepiness of Linus' "It's all in the family" after he first kisses Sabrina makes it impossible for me not to recoil at their final clinch. (Also gotta love him wishing aloud at one point that he were 10 years younger, as if that wouldn't still leave him a good 20 years her senior.)

"Okay, but who could possibly not love Hepburn as Sabrina?" I pretend to hear you wondering. It's a delightfully vivacious performance, to be sure...though I confess that the Sabrina who returns from Paris—ostensibly having so altered her look, comportment and demeanor that David not only fails to recognize her but suddenly finds her intensely alluring—seems all but indistinguishable to me from the chauffeur's daughter we see climbing trees barefoot at the outset. It's the character's fundamental immaturity that bugs me, though. Her infatuation with David is the stuff of teen crushes, and while she does ultimately shake that off, it's only because an equally unfounded passion (based largely on the age difference, it seems—she's drawn to him based on stuff like "Yes, We Have No Bananas!"*) gets superimposed atop the original. She's the same starry-eyed nitwit at the end of the movie that she was at the beginning, now smitten with a middle-aged iceberg instead of a young(er) scoundrel. Doesn't make her a bad person, obviously, but this isn't meant to be a poignant character study of someone who keeps making the same well-intentioned mistakes (à la, say, last year's Diane). It's supposed to be a fizzy if occasionally slightly sour romcom that reinforces our belief in people's fundamental goodness. Yet the moment that stays with me is Linus watching his father fail to extract the last olive from a skinny jar for several minutes before finally smashing the jar open and shoving the olive into Dad's mouth: "Eat it!" That's Billy Wilder.

* Which was a hit of 31 years earlier, so today's equivalent would be me seducing a 20-year-old by playing her "Give It Away." Cut to the girl later that night, dazed and quietly murmuring "What I got you gotta git it put it in you, reelin' with the feelin' don't stop continue."