Sylvia Scarlett is one of the most unusual movies to come out of Hollywood during the 1930's. Directed by George Cukor and starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant (in the first of four movies they would make together). The action takes place in France and England; appropriately enough it plays more like a foreign film than a Hollywood movie.

Hepburn is the titular Sylvia. Her dearly departed mother was French and her father is English. A crooked deal causes father and daughter to flee France for England, only, to better evade the French police, Sylvia masquerades as Sylvester. Like most movies where a character passes for the opposite sex the audience must suspend belief and accept that everyone in the movie believes the deception. Hepburn never looks like a boy in the face, she was far too striking and feminine in her facial features. She does, however, manage to move like a boy. She takes full advantage of her boyish body and athletic prowess, running, jumping and climbing up things like a boy would. At times you almost think of her as a boy, but never completely.

Grant plays against type here. He hadn't yet made his mark as romantic leading man and master of the screwball comedy. He plays Jimmy Monkley, a small time jewel thief with a cockney accent, that Sylvia and her father meet on the boat for England. In a roundabout way he joins their company and the three of them proceed to have adventures in England together, working small cons and eventually buying a caravan and traveling as musicians. In style and mood it has touches of Josef von Sternberg and Ingmar Bergman.

There are several "gay" moments. "Sylvester" gets kissed on the mouth by a woman. At one point a male artist that Sylvia meets tells her she gives him a "queer feeling" and then asks if he can paint "his" portrait. Later when he sees Sylvia in a dress he asks, "Boy, what are you up to?" Then a woman asks Sylvia if she, "…was a girl dressed as a boy, or a boy dressed up like a girl?"

Edmund Gwenn, best known for playing Kris Kringle in the original Miracle on 34th Street, plays Sylvia's father. He is about as far from Santa Claus as you can get, being a swindling alcoholic who eventually loses his mind over a woman.

Sylvia Scarlett bombed at the box office in 1936. Over time, not surprisingly, it has grown in stature and become something of a cult classic. It is completely unlike the other three movies Hepburn and Grant would make together and while it's not a masterpiece it is definitely worth seeing.

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