Smith, Dina M. "Global Cinderella: Sabrina (1954), Hollywood, and Post-War Internationalism." Cinema Journal 41.4 (2002): 27.

Smith’s complex article focuses on the relationship between the United States and Europe post-World War II, in the framework of politics, foreign policy, economics, and the cinema. Films of that era, like Sabrina, she argues, twist the classic Cinderella story to fit the gendered metaphors intrinsic in foreign policy of the time, namely that Europe, as the “culturally savvy orphan” is in need of a “strong rich man,” like America, to save it. The Europe of these films was like a “postcard fantasy” to sheltered Americans: Paris was marketed as a one-dimensional entity that was the visualization of the notion of culture. Smith traces this relationship between American and French film industries back to the era of Lumiere and Pathe Freres. France, and Paris in particular, was something to be consumed, for its food, literature, fashion, and everything else: this idea is central to the plot of Sabrina, and is reflected in much of Hepburn’s career as a “European” star, as argued by Handyside.

Smith also comments on the casting of Bogart, who she claims had an identity of “rugged cowboy American individualism,” as an antithesis to Hepburn’s European sensibilities. In this film, Bogart’s character is the epitome of American economic style, yet by the end, he is inextricably attached to Europe, as both an idea and physically. The author finds many ties between American and European cultural codes referenced in the film, such as how Sabrina needs her Parisian makeover in order to socialize with the higher class of Americans. The film, as mentioned in many other placed, was the first full-scale use of European fashions in an American film; these only emphasize Hepburn’s thin, “hungry” European body, which becomes the clothing that she wears. Smith notes that this film made significant inroads to “incorporate and denationalize” French cultures and its products, something that has continued in American film through the present.