Sabrina

1995

Harrison Ford

Julia Ormond

Greg Kinnear

Directed by Sydney Pollack

6/10

Most filmmakers know damn good and well that it’s best not to remake Billy Wilder movies. 1995’s Sabrina is living proof of that. Not that the movie is horrible because it’s not. It’s just not great and not needed. While for my taste he falls short Harrison Ford lives up to Humphrey Bogart about as well as anyone. He’s just fine as Linus Larrabee the head of the Larrabee corporation a fortune five hundred company leading the way in cutting edge technology. Linus is so dedicated to his work and making money for the company thar he hasn’t left himself much of a personal life. His younger brother David is his polar opposite. He has the same good looks but he’s all play and no work. He hasn’t even been inside his own office in the company building in over a year. He’s all playboy as well. Using the company fame and fortune to do his best Hugh Hefner squiring many willing and gorgeous upper class ladies about town or at least to the selerium at the family mansion during glamorous extravagant parties instead of working. Who could blame the guy? afterall Big brother Linus is there they don’t really need him right? Until one woman captures David’s interest unlike all the others she’s a beautiful successful doctor named Elizabeth Tyson played by Lauren Holly and she just happens to be the daughter of the man who owns the successful Tyson company that Linus has been looking to merge his successful Larrabee company with. What could be better? Two family companies dominating the market. It all looks like it’s a perfect situation until… Enter Sabrina. The daughter of the man who drives the Larrabee family sans David oviously to work and back. He’s a chauffer named Fairchild and he’s been with the family forever raising his daughter Sabrina on the mansion grounds in a little house away from the mansion as he totes the family around in a limo. The most interesting characters in Sabrina are the working class people who are always at their service. We don’t spend much time with them. Sabrina grows into a woman and tells her father Fairchild that the thing she loves most about her father is that he became a chauffer so he would have more time to read. He also has time to make sure his daughter leaves the mansion and see’s the world. He ships her slightly unwillingly off to Paris to intern with a modeling agency being an assistant even though she’s clearly beautiful enough to be one of the models. I guess all the beauty experts there didn’t notice her looks. But Sabrina is a fairytale not a reality. The fairytale for Sabrina is to marry David who she’s crushed on her entire life and when she gets back from Paris all Audrey Hepburn she realizes that she has a real shot at it. When David discovers that Linus just wants him to marry Elizabeth because it’s good for the companies he takes a hard right toward the revamped Sabrina he finally notices is alive, putting the merger at risk. Linus is the family worker and he promptly goes to work. Trying to win Sabrina’s effections himself so David doesn’t have to. His plan is to get her to love him then run her off thereby saving his business The actors in Sabrina all have great chemistry together it’s wonderful casting. The late great Sydney Pollack paints the movie with a beautiful brush. It looks gorgeous. It’s a well made film and his usual skills as a Director and Editor are well at work. And even though Sabrina succeeds as a very nice romantic comedy please don’t remake Billy Wilder films.