Word: sabrinas
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This, Wilder's 20th movie, both climaxes and redeems a career that has produced such diverse films as The Lost Weekend and Some Like it Hot. It embodies all that is best in Wilder: the polish of Sabrina, the bite of Ace in the Hole, and the sentimentality of The Apartment. Plus it adds a new brick to Wilder's pile: understatement...
They are dedicated wives (generally to high-powered men who dabble equally in politics and the arts, wear dinner jackets and parkas with identical ease) and devoted mothers (generally to no more than four picture-book children with fanciful names like Chloe and Sabrina, Tared and Clive). Somehow they find time for charity work, church functions, community projects and college alumnae drives. They are enthusiastic music lovers (with a predilection for baroque quartets, German lieder and early Dixieland, an antipathy for anything atonal) and zealous art collectors (with a penchant for abstract expressionists, pre-Columbian sculpture and 18th century French...
Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) was the beginning of the serious acting career of Humphrey Bogart. Splendid performances in African Queen and Sabrina that followed showed that the type casting of some twenty years had kept back a real talent, but Bogie's popularity fell when he ceased to play the symbol. At the time of his death in 1955 he presided over his own rather sophisticated "rat pack" as a Hollywood elder statesman...
...Saint Joan. The maid of Domremy, by Shaw's description in his preface, was one of the first of modern women, a take-charge overlord of men. But Jefford's Joan is a wide-eyed schoolgirl heroine, as coy and cute as Sabrina fair. The production also suffers from the paralyzed, tableau style of Douglas Scale's direction. In the end, Saint Joan is the least remarkable of the Old Vic's productions, but it is paradoxically the outstanding one of the lot. For Shakespeare's poetry cannot fully conceal the gaping flaws in Macbeth...
Exuberant Vulgarity. On his own, Billy wrote, produced and directed a savage social satire (Ace in the Hole) that flopped hard, then came back handily with Stalag 17, Sabrina, Seven Year Itch, Love in the Afternoon, Witness for the Prosecution. All these films were made from scripts that Billy himself had written-though always in collaboration. "Most of Billy's collaborators," says a friend, "are just $50,000 secretaries." They sit at a typewriter while Billy strides feverishly up and down, slashing the air with a swagger stick, frothing at the mouth with dialogue and situation...