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Sabrina (Paramount). When Hollywood's abracadabblers find a new formula for turning celluloid into gold, they overwork it every time. For Sabrina, based on Samuel Taylor's Broadway hit, Paramount's magicians used the same elements that mixed so well in Roman Holiday: Actress Audrey Hepburn, Director Billy Wilder, a switch on the old Cinderella story. Gold, in a word, is guaranteed at the boxoffice, and this is never less than glittering entertainment, but somehow a certain measure of lead has found its way into the formula.
In the days when Long Island was a sort of multimillionaire's yacht moored to Manhattan, the chauffeur's daughter (Audrey Hepburn) had her eye on a scion (William Holden). But all she ever got in return was the dust of his foreign-made car as he roared off to live another scene from The Great Gatsby. Resigned to a life in the servants' quarters, she went sadly off to cooking school in Paris.
At school, however, Audrey met a baron who had come to study souffle, but decided, after meeting her, "to stay on for the fish." Under the baron's guidance, she learned how to be a tasty dish as well as to make one; and when she came back to Long Island, her Parisian aroma soon had the right man running at the mouth.
Enter the villain: the rich boy's big brother (Humphrey Bogart). who wants junior to merge with a sugar king's daughter so that he, Bogart, can make her father jump through the wedding hoop in a business deal. Audrey, however, is flanking his maneuver. After a hasty inspection of her flank, Bogart determines to turn it, and on that line the rest of the plot is fought.
Actress Hepburn's appeal, it becomes clearer with every appearance, is largely to the imagination; the less acting she does the more people can imagine her doing, and wisely she does very little in Sabrina. That little she does skillfully. By contrast, Actor Holden seems almost too true to a banal type to be good. Bogart, however, being as much a symbol as the Hepburn is—and a cunning scene-stealer besides—holds his own with ease, and sometimes even sets little Audrey down, toreador pants and all, as a Vogue model who has risen above her station.
Bogart, in fact, has all the best scenes: the hearty after-dinner get-together in the smoking room, where stiff old industrialists bounce happily up and down on a sheet of some new plastic ; the rusty attempts to rake Audrey (with a uke, a Yale "dink" and a Rudy Vallee record). Says Bachelor Bogart grimly, as he flounders into love: "It'll come back to me. It's like riding a bicycle."