Recently watched: the flawed, fascinating Sylvia Scarlett
(1935) by the dream trio of Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and director George
Cukor. (Hepburn and Grant, of course, would subsequently re-team in the more celebrated
Bringing Up Baby (1938), Holiday (1938) and The Philadelphia Story (1940)).
Sylvia Scarlett remains one of the strangest films to emerge
from 1930s Golden Age Hollywood and was a notorious mega-flop. (Its commercial
failure would contribute to Hepburn being labelled “box office poison”). “A
cult film now, and true delight for the adventurous, it set a new precedent for
bomb in its day,” Ethan Mordden concludes in his 1983 book Movie Star: A Look
at the Women Who Made Hollywood. Is Sylvia Scarlett a cult film? In an ideal
world it would be!
Not that it’s a misunderstood classic: the factors critics and audiences disliked at the time - its whimsical, farcical and freewheeling lurches in tone - are still evident (as the Variety critic in 1935 complained “It is puzzling in its tangents and sudden jumps”). But this quality is also part of its quirky charm. Hepburn is the titular Sylvia. Fleeing her father’s gambling debts, she’s forced to crop her hair (today we’d call it “a Tilda Swinton cut”) and masquerade as a boy (“Sylvester”). In this screwball comedy about gender fluidity, androgynous Sylvester is irresistible to women and men alike, including a cockney con artist (Grant), a housemaid, a French socialite and a bohemian artist (Brian Aherne). The women overtly flirt with and try to kiss him; the men seem unusually keen to share beds with and undress in front of him. “I don’t know if you’re a boy dressed as a girl or a girl dressed as a boy!” one character exclaims to Sylvia / Sylvester and the thing is, Hepburn is so strikingly attractive in male drag the distinction hardly matters. (When Sylvia’s gender is eventually revealed, everyone is completely nonchalant). On a superficial level, both Grant and Hepburn are peerlessly elegant and wear clothes beautifully. And when we’re first introduced to Grant on the ferry to London, Cukor lights and photographs him as ravishingly as Sternberg did for Dietrich.
