Sylvia Scarlett

The biggest disaster of Katharine Hepburn's early career, this is a sort of updated version of As You Like It.

Three confidence tricksters: Sylvia (Hepburn), her father and a cockney adventurer (Cary Grant) are on the road in a sort of fantasy recreation of rural England. Sylvia has disguised herself as a boy so she won't be recognised. However, while still a boy, she begins to fall in love, first with Grant, and then another man and has to choose between them, and decide whether she wants to live as a man or a woman.

Unfortunately. what the director George Cukor and Hepburn thought was a masterpiece was totally misunderstood by the public at the time. At its preview it was given a contemptuous reception: booing, screaming and people leaving en masse after about twenty minutes. However, this is now considered to be a classic, mostly because it deals with the subject of cross-dressing, and also because it has a strong heroine. It's certainly not traditional mainstream studio stuff, and this is one of its attractions now, as it was its biggest problem in the 1930s.

Cukor said afterwards that his only regret was the addition of a conventional beginning and ending to try and accomodate the audience. Certainly, with out that the film would be much better, but even as it is it's worth seeing both for good performances by Hepburn and Grant, and its refusal to adhere to traditional Hollywood expectations.

Review by Katherine Edge
Taken from EUFS Programme 1995-96