Chandler, Charlotte.  "Sabrina."  Nobody's Perfect:  Billy Wilder, A Personal Biography.  New York:  Simon & Schuster, 2002.  171-176.

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Biographer Charlotte Chandler relies mostly on direct quotations from Billy Wilder to let the story of his life come across. Her book's chapter on Sabrina contains Wilder's reflections and memories of writing and directing the film. These thoughts come from the perspective of decades after the film's original release, and give insight into what could have been a very different movie, but turned out to be Sabrina.

The film was adapted from a play, Samuel Taylor's Sabrina Fair. Wilder began work on the adaptation, along with Taylor, before the play even opened on Broadway. Wilder had no qualms about making changes when adapting this play for the big screen, and he wanted to tweak the dialogue to fit the stars he was hoping would appear in the film (Audrey Hepburn and at the time, Cary Grant). Once the play opened successfully though, Wilder and Taylor began to disagree about the degree of change necessary, leading to Taylor quitting and being replaced by another writer, Ernest Lehman.

It was Lehman who convinced Wilder to steer clear of a sex scene between Sabrina and Linus Larrabee, because it would have hurt Hepburn's image. Lehman and Wilder both agreed that Hepburn was a special actress. Because of her grace, she was perfectly suited for the film's Cinderella allegory. Hepburn had a similar respect for Wilder. This is in contrast to the director's often adversarial relationship with Humphrey Bogart, who played Linus Larrabee.

Chandler notes that Wilder chose to play up Hepburn's "Cinderella quality," and this is evident in her first appearance in the film, when a full moon sits over her shoulder. This fairy tale theme is also echoed in the film's opening narration. Though Hepburn narrates, she is not in character as Sabrina, and this sets the scene for the idyllic story. The class shift and Sabrina's infatuation with older men are also fairy tale-type elements.

Chandler's snapshot of Wilder provides a way for moviewatchers to see the human side of film--though a commodity for making money, directors, writers, and actors could leave personal marks by infusing films with their own ideas.

Some of the reason for the May-December theme had to do with casting, and were not originally intended. In Sabrina, the role of Linus Larrabee was originally meant for Cary Grant, so when it went to Humphrey Bogart, a man much older than Audrey Hepburn, the role took on new layers of meaning. Linus came to be seen additionally as a father figure to Hepburn's young Sabrina. Casting Gary Cooper opposite Hepburn in Love in the Afternoon yielded similar results, as did choosing the iconic Marilyn Monroe to portray what had been a more average role on the Broadway stage in The Seven Year Itch. But Dick also tries to connect this motif to a theme or motivation in Wilder's life. He notes that Wilder's age when he was working on these movies might have affected his outlook. In middle age, the theme of rejuvenation may have been of particular interest to him, and the fatherly relationships may have reflected his own love for his daughter at the time.

In Sabrina, Dick sees one father-daughter bond being replaced with another, the first biological, the second metaphorical. Dick argues that in her relationship with Linus, Sabrina re-channels the love she used to reserve for her father towards her beau. Linus provides financial security and protection for Sabrina, just as a father would. This situation is only believable because the film operates as a fairy tale, Dick says.

Grouping these films together is interesting, but from the descriptions of Love in the Afternoon and The Seven Year Itch, it doesn't seem that the films have as much in common with each other thematically (aside from romance) as Dick might have us believe. And some of what they do have in common, as Dick admits, has do with coincidences of casting. This grouping seems to serve best simply as a way for Dick to organize Wilder's many films.

Because this article takes a methodological approach, it is not very accessible for the average film scholar. It also talks about trends as a whole, leaving out the detailed scene analyses that those interested in films often enjoy. But the article does a good job of trying to examine what the medium of film might have to say about our culture, and its strength lies in its ability to offer empirical evidence of trends, such as an explosion of romantic comedies in the 1990s, as opposed to individual examples. In this way, we can look at the trends of particular decades. When Sabrina was released, in the 1950s, for example, romantic drama was more popular than romantic comedy, a reversal of what is currently true. Other subsets that are popular now, such as teen romances or romances that feature supernatural elements (like 1990's Ghost), were nearly nonexistent in the 1950s.

The study also found that cultural conditions have effectively killed many formerly popular plotlines of romance movies. Couples in different classes, for example, no longer offer a "convincing dramatic impediment." Movies that feature these aging romantic conventions," then, can only remain popular today as "relics of an earlier era." This statement serves to justify Sabrina's ongoing popularity despite its perhaps hard-to-swallow plotline. All in all, romantic films, even the current ones, do continue to reinforce some of the more conservative romantic tendencies in our culture, namely the importance of marriage and fidelity, and this has not changed since the days when Sabrina was released.

Ten sources that discuss Billy Wilder's Sabrina from a variety of perspectives.