Sabrina (Billy Wilder / U.S., 1954):

One of Stroheim's Cinderella fables, The Wedding March, say, adjusted to the family corporate sector. "You know the rules of the game." The Long Island estate has swimming pools and tennis courts, the manicured garden comes with a tree branch for the chauffeur's daughter (Audrey Hepburn) to climb and observe the swell soirees, seething gracefully. The suicidal urge is scored to "Isn't It Romantic?," carbon monoxide in the garage gives way to cooking classes in Paris, "La Vie en rose" announces the metamorphosis from caterpillar to Givenchy butterfly. (As the fairy godfather, Marcel Dalio has blunt advice: "To begin with, you must stop looking like a horse.") Her childhood crush is the heedless company scion (William Holden), whose pending engagement must be protected by the older brother (Humphrey Bogart) to save a merger between sugar and plastics. "A human sacrifice on the altar of industrial progress," the business side of seduction, Billy Wilder's lesson of the soufflé. Letter from an Unknown Woman is lightly adumbrated in the callow playboy who can't recognize the captivating gamine in the passenger's seat, his signature move of champagne flutes in his back pockets leads to a rump full of shards. "What rhymes with glass?" The weathered tough guy tasked with being suave instead locates the humor in his dourness, "Joe College with a touch of arthritis" before the multi-panel mirror. The rich patriarch (Walter Hampden) pads with giant cigar and elusive cocktail olive, the poor one (John Williams) offers a resigned view of life as a limousine: "We're all driving together, but there's a front seat, a back seat, and a window in between." Pollack has the official remake, Wilder himself the unofficial one in Love in the Afternoon. With Martha Hyer, Joan Vohs, Marcel Hillaire, Nella Walker, Francis X. Bushman, and Ellen Corby. In black and white.

--- Fernando F. Croce

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