SpecialsTarget Disturbing yet enthralling

Tacticalin An absolute waste of money

Ogosmith Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Keira Brennan The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

HotToastyRag I'll start with the bottom line: Sylvia Scarlett is the film that dubbed Katharine Hepburn "box office poison". However, when you watch the movie, you wonder how that was possible. She's adorable! After her mother's untimely death, Katharine Hepburn and her father Edmund Gwenn leave France and head to England. Teddy has racked up some pretty heavy gambling debts and needs to leave the country, but when he tells his daughter he has to leave her behind lest he be recognized and arrested, she comes up with an idea. Kate cuts her hair and changes her name from Sylvia to Sylvester; surely her father won't be recognized with a young man as his traveling companion! Along the way, they cross paths with a charming Cockney conman, played by Cary Grant, a flirtatious maid, Dennie Moore, and a respectful artist, Brian Aherne. While they band together and enter the con-game, Kate falls in love and longs to be worthy of Brian—even though he believes she's a boy! It's a pretty cute story, and a lot of fun to see Kate, Teddy, and Cary work off one another. It's no great surprise that Kate makes an excellent boy, since her thin frame, beautifully angular face, and slightly masculine voice help mask her true identity. She looks absolutely adorable—or handsome, if you prefer—in her short haircut, and even though the film didn't do well at the box office, it's a definite must-see for Katharine Hepburn fans!

jarrodmcdonald-1 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.

JimmyCagney First of all, let me tell you I'm not a stranger to movies of the 30's. I love films of that era, I admire Katharine Hepburn and I truly consider Cary Grant as one of the greatest actors ever. These facts are the reasons why I was really interested in watching this movie, however these same facts don't give me the permission to excuse and admire every movie of the 30's I watch and find average (or in this case way below average!) SPOILERS BELOW! Let's start from the script. What kind of a story is this? It seems to me that after the 3 leading characters are being introduced to us, the writers had absolutely no idea as to there the plot should turn to. So they try hard to write down whatever comes to their mind in a desperate effort to create a standard 80 minute long feature. Some examples: 1) What is the reason why Sylvia cut her hair short and becomes Sylvester? Because her father tells her it is much easier for the authorities to trace an old man with a girl than if he was with a boy. So, what does she do? She cuts her hair...and every problem is solved, even if this means they are able to make it to another country with no papers of Sylvia as Sylvestro. A hair cut was enough. 2)How about Jimmy Monkley? He creates all the mess at the harbor just because he is carrying diamonds on his heels. As if there was a chance that when he opened his suitcase the diamonds would come out of his shoe. What about his second encounter with the Scarletts? He reveals them his secret takes out of his pocket a very large bundle of money and buys them out. And then, 5 minutes later, when they are in London, he is completely broke and so are they. 3) The affair between Henry Scarlett and Maudie. Without any clue, we suddenly watch Henry dreaming and yelling out Maudie's name as if he were her "beau", and when he wakes we suddenly realize by the way he is treating her, that he really is her boy. Completely ridiculous. We never saw not even one hint that something was going on between them until that dream sequence. And it is even more ridiculous considering the fact that Maude is slightly older than his daughter, who is a witness of all this the whole time. 4) Maude's disappearance. Maude didn't fit in the story. That was obvious. But making her disappear on a rainy night, without a further explanation on her whereabouts, is stupid. 5) Henry's death. Henry was a terribly written character. So as the plot evolved something had to be done with him. in order to give Scarlett the chance to end happily the story. So what do we do? We through him off a cliff, Scarlett mourns desperately (about 5 seconds) and 3 minutes later she is all full of nerve and joy chasing Cary Grant. 6) How about the Russian girl? We get convinced she loves desperately the painter, yet at the end of the movie she uses him only as an argument to persuade Jimmy on going to Paris. And how the hell did Sylvia come to the conclusion that she tried to kill herself by drowning? Did you notice anything I didn't? Just because she couldn't swim? 7)The painter (Michael Fane) is equally funny (in a bad way) as a character. He gave Sylvia his car cause he couldn't drive with a hurt finger? Lord have mercy! He loved the Russian girl, yet in 5 days he forgot her and came to be deeply in love with Sylvia dressed as a boy?I could go on forever, but I've made my point. As I watched the movie more and more I had the idea that no one from the creative team really knew what they wanted to do. The characters are made from paper, their feelings and sentiments are completely absent (did Jimmy ever love Sylvia? One moment it seems so, 2 minutes later he runs away with the Russian girl), the dialogue is terrible (I recall the scene where Sylvester becomes Sylvia again and pays a visit to the painter and it gives me the creeps.) Never before have I seen such a terrible conversation. Remember guys, it's 1935 we're talking about, not 1925. The age of the movie is no excuse, 2 years later "The Awful Truth" would be filmed.. A final word about the direction. George Cukor has always been a great director, one of the best artists of his era. However, he also seems to be swept by the total stupidity of his material. At the final scene, the train stops exactly 1 second after the painter pulls the emergency break. And as if this weren't enough during this whole sequence, the outside background from the windows remains the same, as if no one from the crew ever noticed or cared for the fact that it was obvious the train was never moving.I apologize for the size of the comment and I also apologize if some of you fellow lovers of the movies of the 30's find this comment embarrassing or disturbing..but this is truly my view on "Sylvia Scarlett". Thank you for your time.

manuel-pestalozzi 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.