Stoutor
It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.
Hayden Kane
There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes
Kaelan Mccaffrey
Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.
Edgar Allan Pooh
. . . instead of its actual setting amid England during the 1930s, Katharine Hepburn as Victor\Victoria--oops, let me scroll back--as Sylvia\Sylvester would be in Big Trouble. As Sylvester, the mannish Hepburn (she hurdles more fences and window sills than even Edwin Moses) would risk incarceration if she drifted into 2017's Tar Heel Country and entered a public john consistent with her duds, but not her birth certificate. However, if Sylvester enters No Man's Land, the Old Biddies of N.C.'s Birther Movement would have a cow as soon as they glimpsed her in drag. The DVD jewel case labels SYLVIA SCARLETT as Kate's "most controversial film," anticipating the hostile takeover of America by the Rich People Party Sex Police led by Veep Pence (who, by the way, has not yet locked up self-confessed serial finger rapist and court-documented marital sex assaulter Rump). Within four years, these Narrow-Minded Fascist Thought Police no doubt will get their sweaty clutches on the copy of SYLVIA SCARLETT I just watched, and either burn it or crush it with one of their Humvee Halftracks. Every American library and school can expect its collections purged of ALL provocative, entertaining, and\or witty books, periodicals, and movies which pose any risk of awakening a semblance of Humanity, Conscience, Common Sense, or Critical Thinking that could be hibernating deep within a Tar Heel Pea Brain.
mark.waltz
I wonder if when Mickey Rooney got popular a few years after this if somebody happened to notice how much he resembled the cross-dressing Katharine Hepburn. And why, you ask, is Katharine Hepburn, the queen of slacks, cross dressing? It appears that her father (Edmund Gwenn) is in trouble with the law, and to prevent the law from finding a middle aged man traveling with a young girl, she becomes a pre-teen boy who ends up getting a crush on cockney Cary Grant who ends up joining up with Hepburn and Gwenn. Several young ladies make passes at Kate while she is distracted by the upper crust Brian Aherne.An extremely convoluted mess, this starts off as light screwball comedy and suddenly switches to melodrama in a flash. There is never any reason to believe it by Grant and the various women would not see through her disguise, slow patches of virtually no action make thus at rimes stop in its tracks.This is the first of four pairings with Hepburn and Grant, and fortunately, they were not jinxed by the first. It gets to a point in this film where I started to get really aggravated, and in spite of some gorgeous photography, this is an irritating bore, making absolutely no sense even with all of the A list talents involved. It lacks director George Cukor's eye for flowing detail, and deserves its reputation as one of the biggest duds of the 1930's, if not Hepburn's career.
writers_reign
It's difficult to imagine the story conferences on this one which is neither fish nor fowl, equally difficult to imagine the talents involved - Grant, Hepburn, Cukor - signing on for something so bizarre unless one or more of them had seen and admired First A Girl which featured the cross-dressing motif and/or The Good Companions which featured a group of touring concert-party performers. There's virtually no attempt at credibility from start to finish with characters being introduced then vanishing more or less as they please. It is always going to be interesting to see Hepburn and Grant in anything and THIS Grant is light-years away from the urbane, sophisticated light comedian persona by which he is best known; here he plays a cockney would-be lovable rogue in what may well be a dress rehearsal for his similar role in None But The Lonely Heart almost a decade later. Before we have time to adjust to one plot-line i.e. the three scammers, we are into another, the strolling players, with neither fully satisfying. Worth one viewing for Grant-Hepburn buffs but won't stand up to a second.
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.
