Sylvia Scarlett is a 1935 romantic comedy film starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, based on a novel by Compton MacKenzie, directed by George Cukor, and notorious as one of the most famous unsucessful movies of the 1930's. Hepburn plays the title role of Sylvia Scarlett, a female con artist masquerading as a boy to escape the police. The success of the subterfuge is in large part due to the skillful transformation of Hepburn by RKO make-up artist Mel Berns.
This film was the first pairing of Grant and Hepburn, who later starred together in Bringing Up Baby (1938), Holiday (1938), and The Philadelphia Story (1940). Cary Grant's performance as dashing rogue incorporates his original Cockney accent and remains widely considered the first time Grant's famous personality began to register on film. (The only other film in which Grant used the Cockney accent with which he grew up is Clifford Odets' None but the Lonely Heart nine years later.)
Escaping to England from a French embezzlement charge, widower Henry Scarlett is accompanied by daughter Sylvia who, to avoid detection, "disguises" herself as a boy, "Sylvester." They are joined by amiable con man Jimmy Monkley, then, after a brief career in crime, meet Maudie Tilt, a giddy, sexy Cockney housemaid who joins them in the new venture of entertaining at resort towns from a caravan. Through all this, amazingly no one recognizes that Sylvia is not a boy...until she meets handsome artist Michael Fane, and drama intrudes on the comedy. Written by Rod Crawford
