Synopsis
Sylvia Scarlett (1935) is an early Hollywood tragicomedy from director George Cukor, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Katharine Hepburn takes the lead — and spends most of the film dressed as a boy.
Her father Henry is fleeing France ahead of an embezzlement charge, slipping across to England. To get them both through unnoticed, Sylvia crops her hair and becomes Sylvester, a young man who draws fewer questions at a border. Along the way they fall in with Jimmy Monkley (Cary Grant), a charming small-time crook, and the four roam England as traveling performers and petty con artists. Things tangle when painter Michael Fane starts seeing something in "Sylvester" he can't quite explain.
The film flopped in 1935 and was written off; today it gets revisited as a daring piece about disguise and the slipperiness of gender, decades ahead of its moment. It's also the role where Cary Grant first played a rogue instead of a leading man — and became a star doing it. Stream Sylvia Scarlett (1935) online on iFILM.
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