Sabrina (1954) 4K Restoration
Director: Billy Wilder Run Time: 113 min. Release Year: 1954
Starring: Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, John Williams, Walter Hampden, William Holden
Country: United States
Language: English, French
Some Like It Hot: The Films of Billy Wilder
A new retrospective celebrating one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Classic Hollywood cinema.
See more Billy WilderAbout the film:
Linus and David Larrabee are the two sons of a very wealthy family. Linus (Humphrey Bogart) is all work – busily running the family corporate empire, he has no time for a wife and family. David (William Holden) is all play – technically he is employed by the family business, but never shows up for work, spends all his time entertaining, and has been married and divorced three times.
Meanwhile, Sabrina Fairchild (Audrey Hepburn in an Academy Award-nominated performance) is the young, shy, and awkward daughter of the household chauffeur, who goes away to Paris for two years, and returns to capture David’s attention, but it’s his more serious brother Linus who would be the better man for her.
The film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the U.S. Library of Congress in 2002.
About the filmmaker:
Billy Wilder was an Austrian-born American filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, artist, and journalist, whose career spanned more than 50 years and 60 films. He is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Classic Hollywood cinema.
Wilder first became a screenwriter in the late 1920s while living in Berlin. After the rise of Adolf Hitler, Wilder, who was Jewish, left for Paris, where he made his directorial debut. He relocated to Hollywood in 1933, and in 1939 he had a hit as a co-writer of the screenplay to the screwball comedy Ninotchka. Wilder established his directorial reputation after helming Double Indemnity (1944). In 1950, he co-wrote and directed the critically acclaimed Sunset Boulevard. From the mid-1950s on, Wilder made mostly comedies. Among the classics Wilder created in this period are the darkly funny war film Stalag 17 (1953), the romantic comedies Sabrina (1954) and The Apartment (1960), the courtroom drama Witness for the Prosecution (1957), and the farces The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959).
Over his five decade career, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director eight times, winning twice, and for a screenplay Academy Award 13 times, winning three times. He earned numerous lifetime honors, including AFI Life Achievement Award in 1986, the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1988, and the National Medal of Arts in 1993. Wilder holds a significant place in the history of Hollywood censorship for expanding the range of acceptable subject matter.
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