Only a director who has braved the egos and complex talents of Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman might have the daring to remake Billy Wilder’s 1954 Sabrina, starring Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn and William Holden. Such a director is Sidney Pollack, who remade Sabrina in 1995. While nothing could compare to the star power of the original version, Pollack’s Sabrina does come pretty close in the attempt. Pollack’s Sabrina stars Harrison Ford and then cinema newcomers Julia Ormond and Greg Kinnear. Other than doing away with the wealthy Larrabbee family patriarch, changing the settings and adding some personality to the fiancée of David Larrabbee of the original, Pollack’s version is nearly identical to the original. Sabrina is a fairy-tale romantic comedy in which the daughter of the chauffeur of a wealthy family changes from an ugly-duckling into a swan and ends up marrying the eldest Larrabbee son, Linus. Along the way we see how class stratification exists between the wealthy and their hired help, a distinction that has changed little in the four decades of history between the two films.
The ostentatious wealth of the Larrabbee’s stands in sharp contrast to the lack of wealth of the servants in both films. We see that in the world of the wealthy the servants are always on the outside looking in on the “high-life” of their employers. We see this most particularly in the character of Sabrina before she heads off to Paris. From the time she is a young girl Sabrina studies the goings-on of the Larrabbee’s as if she is researching a sociology thesis. She hides in trees and watches their lavish elegant parties, parties during which it would never rain because “The Larrabbee’s wouldn’t allow it.” The chauffeur in each film is a chauffeur by choice because it was an occupation that would give him plenty of time to read. However, we are told in the opening of both films that, like t...