Sylvia Scarlett (1936)

Synopsis: This complex movie may have been a bit risqué for audiences in 1936, but as one of three films Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant made with George Cukor, it remains an idiosyncratic gem. Based on the Compton Mackenzie novel, SYLVIA SCARLETT has become a cult classic because of Hepburn's... This complex movie may have been a bit risqué for audiences in 1936, but as one of three films Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant made with George Cukor, it remains an idiosyncratic gem. Based on the Compton Mackenzie novel, SYLVIA SCARLETT has become a cult classic because of Hepburn's performance as the daughter of a grieving, compulsive gambler who tries to alleviate their financial misery by stealing expensive French lace. In order to smuggle it out of the country, Hepburn chops her hair and masquerades as a boy; when she meets cockney jewel thief Jimmy Monkley (Grant) on a ship to England, it's just the beginning of a cascade of gender-confusion issues--23 years before Billy Wilder's SOME LIKE IT HOT--yet unlike that film, SYLVIA SCARLETT is not all for laughs. The tension between good humor and hard luck is most deftly displayed by Grant, whose charismatic jewel-thief persona would later be tapped for Alfred Hitchcock's TO CATCH A THIEF. [More]