Sylvia Scarlett **** (1935, Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Edmund Gwenn)) – Classic Movie Review 1,260

George Cukor’s 1935 romantic comedy adventure film Sylvia Scarlett stars Katharine Hepburn the title role of a female con artist who disguises herself as a boy to escape the police.

Director George Cukor’s 1935 romantic comedy adventure film Sylvia Scarlett stars Katharine Hepburn the title role of Sylvia Scarlett, a female con artist who disguises herself as a boy to escape the police and flee from Victorian England to France along with her embezzling rogue of a father, Henry (Edmund Gwenn). It is notable, indeed memorable, as the first of four films pairing Hepburn with Cary Grant.

Old Henry was discovered to be an embezzler while employed as a bookkeeper for a lace factory. He and Sylvia are on the run just one step ahead of the law. But on the English Channel ferry, they meet gentleman adventurer Jimmy Monkley (Grant), who soon becomes partners with them in his con games.

This fascinating and delightful movie is based on the novel The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett by Compton Mackenzie and is crafted with obvious relish and joy by Hepburn’s favourite director and friend, George Cukor. Hepburn, Grant and twinkly old Gwenn give great value, as always.

It’s highly amusing to see the young, radiant Hepburn in drag, and the film’s sheer oddness is extremely attractive. The success of Sylvia Scarlett’s masquerade is in large part due to the transformation of Hepburn by RKO Studios make-up artist Mel Berns.

Establishing his iconic star persona, Grant starts his ascent to stardom as a dashing rogue, a most peculiar Cockney character with a most peculiar Cockney accent, which Grant wisely later largely abandoned in films.

Alas Sylvia Scarlett became notorious as one of the most famous unsuccessful movies of the 1930s when the public of the day really rejected it, and particularly disliked Hepburn’s gender-bending wooing of both sexes. RKO records show the film lost $363,000, and it began Hepburn’s career collapse, causing her to be branded box office poison, though she finally recovered from it.

Grant and Hepburn later starred together in Bringing Up Baby (1938), Holiday (1938) and The Philadelphia Story (1940). Gwenn (1877-1959) is best remembered for his Kris Kringle in the 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street, for which he won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

It was an open secret in Hollywood that Cukor was gay though he was discreet about it. By the mid-1930s, Cukor was not only established as a top director but also socially as an unofficial head of Hollywood’s gay sub-culture. His home was the venue for famed soirées, whose guests included close friends like Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Joan Crawford, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Claudette Colbert, Marlene Dietrich, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh.

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