Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Save Me, Sabrina Fair

The assignment last night for my class on Milton was to read A Masque at Ludlow Castle, known in literary circles as Comus.  Partway through the poem I realized that I recognized a particular passage:

Sabrina fair,
Listen where thou art sitting
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
In twisted braids of lilies knitting
The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair;
Listen for dear honour's sake,
Goddess of the silver lake,
Listen and save.

It is the poem mentioned in Sabrina, a 1954 movie starring Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, and William Holden. It was remade in 1995 with Julia Ormond, Harrison Ford, and Greg Kinnear, and this is one of few remakes I consider to be equal to the original.  There are so many funny lines in the remake, and Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn's chemistry is just breathtaking. They're both incredible movies about a girl named Sabrina, who's the daughter of the chauffeur to the extremely wealthy Larrabee family.  She goes to Paris and returns grown up and beautiful, catching the eye of her life-long crush, David Larrabee.  David, however, is about to be married to a woman who's father's expanding company is about to merged with that of David's cold-hearted older brother, Linus. Linus doesn't want anything to happen to his business deal, so he keeps Sabrina out of David's way with the plan that he, Linus, will attempt to make Sabrina fall in love with him and then leave her brokenhearted.  Things don't go completely according to plan, however...




The reason the Milton poem is mentioned is because Sabrina's parents named her after the river goddess from the poem, and she quotes the above passage to Linus, who later calls her "Sabrina Fair."

Apparently there's a Bollywood version called Yeh Dillagi, which I have not seen. It's done by Yash Chopra, who produced Dhoom and Dhoom 2, the latter being one of my favorite Bollywood movies. Pretty cool, huh?

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