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| SYLVIA SCARLETT (1936) |
An RKO Radio Picture
B&W, 94 minutes
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CAST
Sylvia Scarlett: Katharine Hepburn
Jimmy Monkley: Cary Grant
Michael Fane: Brian Aherne
Henry Scarlett: Edmund Gwenn
Lily: Natalie Paley
Maudie Tilt: Dennie Moore
Drunk: Lennox Pawle
Bobby: Harold Cheevers
Sergeant Major: Lionel Pape
Turnkey: Robert (Bob) Adair
Stewards: Peter Hobbes, Leonard Mudie, Jack Vanair
Conductor: Harold Entwistle
Stewardess: Adrienne D'Ambricourt
Pursers: Gaston Glass, Michael S. Visaroff
Maid: Bunny Beatty
Customs Inspectors: E.E. Clive, Edward Cooper, Olaf Hytten
Russian: Dina Smirnova
Frenchman: George Nardelli
and Daisy Belmore, Elspeth Dudgeon, May Beatty, Connie Lamont, Gwendolyn Logan, Carmen Beretta
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CREDITS
Director: George Cukor
Producer: Pandro S. Berman
Scenarists: Gladys Unger, John Collier, Mortimer Offner
Based on the Novel The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett by: Compton MacKenzie
Photographer: Joseph August
Art Director: Van Nest Polglase
Associate Art Director: Sturges Carne
Editor: Jane Loring
Sound Recorder: George D. Ellis
Musical Score: Roy Webb
Music Recorded By: P.J. Faulkner Jr.
Costumer (for Miss Hepburn): Muriel King
Costumer (for Miss Paley): Bernard Newman
Makeup Artist: Mel Burns
Assistant Director: Argyle Nelson
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SYNOPSIS
After Sylvia Scarlett's father commits larceny and is forced to flee France, she joins him, masquerading as a boy, so they will not easily be detected. They join up with a raffish cockney, Jimmy Monkley, soon practise a bit of swindling in London, and then take to the road with a Pierrot show. Sylvia soon becomes involved with a handsome, well-to-do artist, Michael Fane.
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CRITIQUES
"The dynamic Miss Hepburn is the handsomest boy of the season. I am forced to say that her vehicle is a sprawling and ineffective essay in dramatic chaos, with characters and situations enmeshed in vague obscurities, but for Miss Hepburn's performance I have only admiration. I don't care for Sylvia Scarlett a bit, but I do think Miss Hepburn is much better in it than she was as the small-town wallflower in Alice Adams."
- Richard Watts Jr., New York Herald Tribune, 1936
"Mr. Cukor's theatrical direction and the stars' artificial performances are among other unpleasant problems of the day. Miss Hepburn destroys her usual striking good looks by chopping off her hair and wearing highly unbecoming masculine garb, in which, since she still glides instead of walking, she makes a most unconvincing boy. The picture is a tragic waste of time and screen talent."
- Eileen Creelman, New York Sun, 1936
"This Katharine Hepburn film, directed by George Cukor, was not a success - and, fascinating as it is, you'll know why. Taken from a Compton Mackenzie novel, and set in Cornwall but actually shot on the California coast, it features an oddly erotic transvestite performance - Hepburn is dressed as a boy throughout most of the film - and a peculiarly upsetting love affair between Edmund Gwenn, as her con-man father, and an uncouth young tease (Dennie Moore). The movie seems to go wrong in a million directions, but it has unusually affecting qualities. Cary Grant plays a brashly likable product of the British slums - this was the picture in which his boisterous energy first broke through. He and a fearfully smirky Brian Aherne are the male leads, and the beautiful Natalie Paley is the bitch-villainess. The extraordinarily free cinematography is by Joseph August; no other Cukor film of the 30s ever looked like this one. But this is a one-of-a-kind movie in any case: when the con artists weary of a life of petty crime, they become strolling players, and at one lovely point, Hepburn, Grant, Gwenn, and Dennie Moore sing a music-hall number about the sea."
- Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
"A small and intriguingly bizarre gem, its picaresque story once again revealing Cukor’s abiding interest in the joys and pains, deceptions and truths associated with the art of acting. The performer here is young Sylvia (Hepburn), forced to dress as a boy when her embezzler father (Gwenn) returns to England from France in dire straits. The pair fall in with troublesome landladies, a touring theatrical company, a roguish con-man (Grant), and a romantic painter (Aherne); and the film comes to centre on the way Hepburn’s life of pretence affects not only her own emotional development but those around her. Just as the sexual nuances of her various encounters remain ambiguous, so the film seems unable to decide whether to opt for comedy, romantic adventure, or tragedy; Gwenn, for example, gradually loses his sanity, a darkening backdrop to the scenes of light, breezy banter between the leads. Odd, then, but entirely civilised and engaging, and Hepburn was rarely more radiant or moving."
- Geoff Andrew, Time Out
"For my money, the most interesting and audacious movie George Cukor ever made. Katharine Hepburn disguises herself as a boy to escape from France to England with her crooked father (Edmund Gwenn); they fall in with a group of traveling players, including Cary Grant (at his most cockney and remarkable), and the ambiguous sexual feelings that Hepburn as a boy provokes in both Grant and Brian Aherne (an aristocratic artist) are part of what makes this film so subversive and special. It boldly and disconcertingly seems to switch tone and genre every few moments, from farce to tragedy to romance to crime thriller and back again - rather like the French New Wave films that were to come a quarter of a century later - as Cukor's fascination with theater and the outsized talents of his cast somehow hold it all together. The film flopped miserably when it came out in 1935, but it survives as one of the most poetic, magical, and inventive Hollywood films of its era. John Collier collaborated on the script, and Joseph August did the evocative cinematography."
- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
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COMMENTARY TRACK
"Sylvia Scarlett - a real disaster - with Cary Grant. Our first picture together. It was a strange experience. Compton Mackenzie wrote the book. As we shot the picture, I began to wonder what Cukor was thinking. It just did not seem to me to work - just not funny....Cary Grant's performance in this picture was magic. He was his true self - a real cockney - slightly plump and full of beans. His energy was incredible, his laughter full and unguarded. Teddy Gwenn and I were his stooges. It was a great setup, which didn't quite work. And the relationship with Brian Aherne was dull. Not Brian's fault."
- Katharine Hepburn, Me, 1991
"By far the worst picture I ever made, and the greatest catastrophe of Kate's thirties' career...I had nothing to do with it. I despised everything about it. It was a private promotional deal of Hepburn and Cukor; they conned me into it and had a script written. I said to them, 'Jesus, this is awful, terrible, I don't understand a thing that's going on.' I tried to stop them, but they wouldn't be stopped; they were hell-bent, claiming that this was the greatest thing they had ever found."
- Pandro S. Berman
"It had a remarkable vitality and it's survived all kinds of things. Even after it was passed over, it kept on playing in little theaters for years, and I'd use it as an insanity test. When people said to me - Judy Holliday said it once - 'Oh, I loved that picture!' I used to tell them, 'Now I know about you, your mind is not too good.' It was a lost cause for many years. I suppose that for Kate and myself, our attitude has frozen into being comic about it....I'd always liked the book, and it struck me that Kate had that quality they used to call garçonne, and I thought it would be a perfect part for her."
- George Cukor, interview with Gavin Lambert, 1970
"I saw the picture recently and thought the first part was terribly amusing, but then the story seemed to bog down. There was a terrible outcry when it was first released. All of my experiences at the previews were disasters. People were actually walking out in the middle of the film. After one screening, Kate and I saw the producer of the film, Pandro S. Berman, and we immediately offered to do another picture for him for nothing. He looked at us, not realizing that we were kidding and trying to laugh it all off, and he said with a straight face, 'I hope I never see either of you again.' Sylvia Scarlett was a picture in which the central idea simply got out of hand. Now it's become a kind of cult film. There are some amusing things in it, but forty years ago they didn't work. Now, when humour in films is much more offbeat, audiences see a liveliness in Sylvia Scarlett."
- George Cukor, interview with the American Film Institute, 1978
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HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY
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Katharine Hepburn
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Katharine Hepburn
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Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Edmund Gwenn
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Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn
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Katharine Hepburn
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Cary Grant, Dennie Moore, Edmund Gwenn, Katharine Hepburn
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Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant
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Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant
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Katharine Hepburn, Brian Aherne
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Katharine Hepburn, Brian Aherne
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Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn
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Katharine Hepburn, Brian Aherne
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Katharine Hepburn
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On the set: Katharine Hepburn, George Cukor, Cary Grant
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