What do they see in Sabrina?

Adam. Vol 2, num 1, 1957

What do they see in Sabrina?

Adam , Vol 2 Number 1, 1957 (USA)

SOMEHOW, no American movie fan would be geared to expect the most luscious glamorous hunk of spungold-crowned English loveliness to emerge from such J. Arthur Rankies as "Stock Car" (ugh!) or "Ramsbottom Rides Again" (ugh, ugh!!).

Normally quite conservative British pigeons and people have gone gaga over Manchester's gift to the cinema...!

Neither of the above cinemaepics has exactly started grass-fires in the greenery of the United States Mint at Philadelphia. Well, the British do things differently, that's all, for but of these two celluloid spools of obscurity has emerged a lush blonde bit that has bumbershooted and bowler-hatted Britons of the best birdwatching tradition walking on their heels in the purlieus of their West End clubs and slobbering slightly and politely through their Coldstream-trimmed soup-strainers.

Its name, for publicity purposes, is Sabrina, and the real monicker is, at present, a deep, if far from dark, secret. Perhaps, like her companion British bombshell, Diana Dors (born Diana Pluck), her honest-to-Christening name is unspeakable, not to mention almost unprintable, though solution of the mystery will have to wait.

Sabrina, whose public relations crew admits to her birth (in Manchester) and age (21), is currently the newest and hottest property in the overseas glamor sweepstakes. Golden-haired, blue-eyed and vampire-red of poutingful lips, Sabrina's dimensions, sensationally adjusted on her five-foot-six inch frame, are as numerous as her professional name is singular.

The girl breaks the tapes at an eye-and-whistlecatching 40-22-36 where said figures do quite the most good of all. Ever since being caught with the beautiful but unspectacularly dimensioned Sally Grey at the moment the Monroe-Mansfield axis burst upon the English film consciousness, our cousins across the water have been busily trying to breed blondes with bosoms, just as, for years, they have tried to breed racehorses capable of carrying off some of America's fatter stakes.

Fortunately for their efforts; they seem to have come up with a couple of prospective winners in Diana and Sabrina, where their equine thoroughbreds merely linger on in the ducal barns, devouring the oat-crop and otherwise preparing themselves for the glue emporium. However, where exploitation of such precious packages and potential hot cinema properties as Sabrina are concerned, the English remain a good, stodgy two decades behind the up-to-date Hollywood publicity aces.

When Diana Dors came to Hollywood, a season or so back, the best she could do to get space in the newspapers was to have her husband push a stray party character or two into her rented, kidney-shaped pool. "So far, the campaign to make England and America conscious of Sabrina's delightfully globular shapeliness is being conducted along similarly archaic lines.

[See the Flannelette Series for the 'cleaned up' version of this nipslip]

There is the bit of the single mysterious name, to begin with. It sounds pretty corny over here, but there it's an old non-Spanish custom apparently. Remember Belita, the frozenfaced ice-skating star whose expressionless emoting continues to turn up in B-picture reruns on your television screen?

Come what may, our cousins are strong for precedent. Having hung the name on the kid, her exploiters then proceeded to "discover" her by planting her picture in the widely circulated sensational weekly known as "Picture Post". Do they pose her in a bikini or a semi-transparent "shortie" gown, or even in a plunging after-dark decolletage? No, they put Sabrina in the tight sweater that has been ho-hum orthodox since 1937, when MGM began the tight sweater pitch, with Lana Turner. However, with that delightful 40-inch bosom of Sabrina's, the British may have a point there - a couple of them, in fact!

Next step in the development of Sabrina (who needs no visible development at all!) came in casting her for a dumb-blonde bit on English television. Apparently, since commercial TV hit Britain, things have been happening. The thought of anything that sizzling on the austere "Third Program" of the British Broadcasting System is enough to send baronets off babbling. But it begins to look as if things are finally livening up a bit over there. The results were sensational. When the girl comes off-stage after a broadcast or personal appearance, she has to keep in a pocket of guards like a T formation quarterback to avoid having those luscious dimensions rudely exposed to the raw British air.

The supposedly staid Londoners have more than once threatened to love her to pieces. Sabrina, outside of her walk-on and the two films above-mentioned, has picked up a number of other television credits among them parts in 'Before Your Very Eyes" and "Double Your Money".

She has also put in recent summer stock experience in a thing called "Revue at Blackpool". As a result of all this experience, she has been signed to lend her name to a gossip column for the British version of "Photoplay" Magazine. For the rest, Sabrina, is an only child and is studying the inevitable singing, dancing and dramatics, aiming for the equally (she hopes) inevitable Hollywood career.

There, in most unlikely fashion, she expresses a wish to marry Steve Cochran of all people. Her favorite actors are Laurence Olivier and Richard Burton (British) and Richard Egan (American). As for her ambitions, by her own account, they include "literally everything".

In short, here's a kid who seems to want it all, Well, with what she's got, she might possibly get same before she's through. Certainly, she must have been inspired to select Manchester as her birthplace - for nothing chestier than Sabrina has come out of England in the memory of man. If she can ever live down "Ramsbottom Rides Again" she ought to have it made!