Hepburn and Grant's Cinematic Partnership Kicked off in Style With Sylvia Scarlett

Sometimes, box office duds come up short at the box office simply because they're outright terrible cinema. It's hard to imagine any scenario where Battlefield: Earth or The Adventures of Pluto Nash would resonate with the public deeply enough to make big box office bucks. But more often than not, good movies are the ones that end up perishing at the box office while the likes of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen rack up over $400 million domestically. Thankfully, good movies that come up short financially can end up garnering a better reputation over time. Take Sylvia Scarlett for instance, a 1935 comedy that ended up flopping at the box office despite being an immensely important movie historically since it was the first time director George Cukor, Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant all worked together (Cukor and Hepburn had previously collaborated sans Grant on Little Women).


In the grand tradition of Twelfth Night, She's the Man and Work It!, Sylvia Scarlett is a comedy about a protagonist who poses as a different gender than their own. In this case, the titular protagonist (portrayed by Katharine Hepburn) is a woman who poses as a man named Sebastian so that she can help her outlaw father, Henry (Edmund Gwenn), evade detective by the authorities as they make their way to London. While on their trip, they cross paths with conman Jimmy Monkley (Cary Grant), who coerces a disguised Sylvia and her father to join him in his duplicitous escapades. Surprisingly, such escapades actually avoid the more tired gender-bender comedy gags that were already hackneyed by 1935.

Instead, Sylvia Scarlett goes down the far more interesting path of being a conman caper as this trio of eccentric individuals try to work together in pulling off scams. Crime comedy turns out to be an especially good avenue for the primary selling point of Sylvia Scarlett, the comedic talents of its lead actors. Take leading lady Katherine Hepburn for example, her boisterous confidence that makes George Clooney in Ocean's Eleven look like Albert Brooks in Finding Nemo was practically handmade for this genre! Hepburn's talents have always been reliably entertaining even in weaker fare like Morning Glory, so in a film as humorously-written like Sylvia Scarlett, she truly becomes electric with her performance.

Heck, Hepburn's amusing even when she's not speaking. Her decision to keep Sylvia/Sebastian constantly moving around even when she's just lingering around in the background (like when she's rolling around on a bed while Cary Grant is in a state of woe over their financial state) makes her presence in Sylvia Scarlett a consistently amusing one. To boot, the rich chemistry she'd share with Cary Grant in plenty of famous subsequent projects is alive and well here in their first film together. It's quite a hoot to watch Grant playing such a stern experienced conman, it's the kind of traditional leading man role he'd end up subverting more often than actually playing later on in his career.

Luckily, Grant proves to be a solid worldly foil to Sylvia and her papa, the latter character played with a humorous disposition by Edmund Gwenn. Much of Sylvia Scarlett and its comedy is handed over just to these performers though that's not to say that the performers are the only noteworthy aspects of the production. The screenplay, attributed to three writers, is a well-oiled machine that ends up making use of and paying off every little plot detail it brings into the picture, usually to highly comedic effect. This is especially true of a dress Sylvia steals on the beach later on in the story, seemingly a brief digression to explain how she got some femme clothes ends up coming back into play in the story in a mighty hilarious fashion.

There's nary a moment wasted in this 90-minute film under the direction of Hollywood legend George Cukor. As his 1940 film The Philadelphia Story would later solidify, Cukor was a smart filmmaker who knew how to get the best performances out of iconic performers and execute his enjoyably low-key comedies in an amiable fashion. Cukor's films tend to be flat-out fun to watch and the same is true of his 1935 directorial effort Sylvia Scarlett. It may have perished at the box office in its initial release, but a comedy this entertaining can't be wiped out that easily and the fact that its principal creative players reunited numerous times afterwards show the positive ripple effects of Sylvia Scarlett.