Sylvia Scarlett (1935)

People are voting emotionally.

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

I wonder if when Mickey Rooney got popular a few years after this if somebody happened to notice how much he resembled the cross-dressing Katharine Hepburn. And why, you ask, is Katharine Hepburn, the queen of slacks, cross dressing? It appears that her father (Edmund Gwenn) is in trouble with the law, and to prevent the law from finding a middle aged man traveling with a young girl, she becomes a pre-teen boy who ends up getting a crush on cockney Cary Grant who ends up joining up with Hepburn and Gwenn. Several young ladies make passes at Kate while she is distracted by the upper crust Brian Aherne.An extremely convoluted mess, this starts off as light screwball comedy and suddenly switches to melodrama in a flash. There is never any reason to believe it by Grant and the various women would not see through her disguise, slow patches of virtually no action make thus at rimes stop in its tracks.This is the first of four pairings with Hepburn and Grant, and fortunately, they were not jinxed by the first. It gets to a point in this film where I started to get really aggravated, and in spite of some gorgeous photography, this is an irritating bore, making absolutely no sense even with all of the A list talents involved. It lacks director George Cukor's eye for flowing detail, and deserves its reputation as one of the biggest duds of the 1930's, if not Hepburn's career.

Audiences may not know what to make of Sylvia Scarlett, with its gender-bending theme and its tinge of Sapphic love (Katharine Hepburn shares two kisses with other women in this picture). But it really is much more. The film has a unique identity, full of spirit and fun. That in and of itself makes it worthwhile. Could director George Cukor and his cast possibly make any money for the studio with this picture? Probably not. Though it's as if they are unconcerned with financial considerations and just let their work run the gamut and roam wild and free. I think that makes it a selfless work of art. It is not trying to hoodwink us into being a customer. It is just being itself and letting us follow along for the ride. Of course, Hepburn's role is definitely a character study in transgender states of mind. Sylvia/Sylvester deals with some identity issues and anguishes about it, but it stays light and not too gloomy. In other films, Hepburn plays tougher, more masculine roles. But here, she's just the right combination of masculine-feminine.

Meandering curio about an embezzler (Edmund Gwenn) and his daughter (Katharine Hepburn) posing as his son as they flee from the police. Along the way they join up with con man Cary Grant. Director George Cukor gives us a real weird one here. Unfortunately its weirdness doesn't overcome its many flaws: hole-ridden script, weak direction, and poor acting. Especially the acting from Hepburn. P.U. she stunk! The more I see of early Katharine Hepburn movies the more surprised I am she ever got anywhere. She was terrible in this. Gwenn wasn't much better. With this director and cast, this really should have been a better film. Obviously, Hepburn and Grant fans should (and will) try it out. Anybody else I would say go watch "The Major and the Minor" instead.

The main problem of this movie is that it does not know what it wants to be. A comedy? A romance? A tragedy? Or a pre neo realistic drama? Somehow it constantly switches from one mode to another, some scenes have an obnoxious musical score, others are bleak and filled with an uneasy silence. In itself these scenes may work, as a whole the movie becomes a mess.But there is a lot of interesting things that are going on which make Sylvia Scarlett a very unusual movie well worth watching. Basically it is a story about coming of age. The main character is a young girl, played by Kathatine Hepburn who might be just a little too old for the part (this problem constantly seem to creep up in movies with her). The circumstances of her turning from a girl into a woman are far from ideal. Her mother is dead, her father's a crook, and a very dumb and unsuccessful one too. They are on the run from France to Britain and there team up with another British working class crook, played by Cary Grant before he became, uh, Cary Grant, with a fitting British accent (his own?) to boot. It is a rather dark part, I must say, and he pulls it of very convincingly.Coming of age here clearly also includes a sexual awakening. For her escape the girl dresses up as boy (Katharine Hepburn is very convincing and can show off her very good grasp of the French language). The Cary Grant character is a vaguely menacing presence and for his sake she does not reveal her true sex. The team of three are joined by the maid of a house they unsuccessfully try to burglarize (a great British actress who does not even seem to be in the credits!) and together they rather abruptly form a traveling circus. The relationship between Hepburn and Grant strangely anticipates the one between Giulietta Masina and Anthony Quinn in Federico Fellini's La Strada, between a sexually not clearly defined young girl and a sort of a boorish, menacing satyr.Only when the girl meets an artist in a Cornish village, does she become aware of her feeling towards men and turns into a woman – only to be cruelly disappointed. The ending seems to be a Hollywood addition. It does not fit at all the rest of the rather sad story.The Cornish village seems to be a kind of a colony of free wheeling artists, some kind of precursor of a hippie community. It really made me think of some movies of the 60ies and 70ies, like Easy Rider or The Long Goodbye. One of the greatest scenes has Hepburn dance over the village square to the artist's barn that was converted into a studio. The big doors are wide open, and inside there is a big table set for a kind of a banquet. It is all a studio set, of course, but the space flowing from the square into the interior is very impressive. Overall the set design department did a very good job for this movie.