Sabrina

Sabrina (Sabrina Fair/La Vie en Rose in the United Kingdom) is a 1954 American romantic comedy-drama film produced and directed by Billy Wilder, from a screenplay he co-wrote with Samuel Taylor and Ernest Lehman, based on Taylor’s 1953 play Sabrina Fair.^[4] The picture stars Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn, and William Holden. This was Wilder’s last film released by Paramount Pictures, ending a 12-year business relationship between him and the company.

In 2002, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.^[5]

Plot

Sabrina Fairchild is the young daughter of the Larrabee family’s chauffeur, Thomas Fairchild, and has been in love with David Larrabee all her life. David, a three-times-married, non-working playboy, has never paid romantic attention to Sabrina. Since she has lived for years on the Larrabee estate in Long Island with her father, to David she is still a child.

Eavesdropping on a party at the mansion the night before she is to leave to attend the Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, Sabrina watches, follows, and listens as David entices yet another woman into a dark and vacant indoor tennis court. Distraught, she leaves her father a suicide note and then starts all eight cars in the closed garage in order to kill herself. She is passing out from the fumes when Linus, David’s older brother, opens the door, discovers her and carries her back to her quarters above the garage when she does pass out.