Watch Sylvia Scarlett For Free

hyped garbage

Good concept, poorly executed.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Audiences may not know what to make of Sylvia Scarlett, with its gender-bending theme and its tinge of Sapphic love (Katharine Hepburn shares two kisses with other women in this picture). But it really is much more. The film has a unique identity, full of spirit and fun. That in and of itself makes it worthwhile. Could director George Cukor and his cast possibly make any money for the studio with this picture? Probably not. Though it's as if they are unconcerned with financial considerations and just let their work run the gamut and roam wild and free. I think that makes it a selfless work of art. It is not trying to hoodwink us into being a customer. It is just being itself and letting us follow along for the ride. Of course, Hepburn's role is definitely a character study in transgender states of mind. Sylvia/Sylvester deals with some identity issues and anguishes about it, but it stays light and not too gloomy. In other films, Hepburn plays tougher, more masculine roles. But here, she's just the right combination of masculine-feminine.

"Sylvia Scarlett" is like a screwball comedy that can't commit to being a screwball comedy.Hepburn spends much of the first part of the film disguised as a boy so that she and her father (Edmund Gwenn), who are on the lam because of Gwenn's gambling debts, will be less conspicuous. They meet up with a Cockney shyster played by Cary Grant, who falls for Hepburn once he realizes she's actually a girl. Brian Aherne, playing a handsome gentleman the three come across during their travels, falls for her too. The finale involves a zany chase in which Hepburn and Aherne take off after Grant and Aherne's girlfriend in an attempt to get them back, only to discover once they've set off that they really like each other and don't much care about finding the disloyal lovers.The fact that the film takes on gender issues at ALL makes it a curio worthy of interest, but just WHAT the film wants to do with those gender issues is never clear. Hepburn plays the character like a tomboy who's uncomfortable in her feminine skin, which is completely at odds with the girly girl she portrays in the film's very first scene. The film is never especially funny, but its overall tone is too lighthearted for the dramatic moments to make much of an impact. The editing is ragged and jumpy, which makes me wonder if the studio did some injudicious hacking, leaving elements that that would have made the film make more sense on the cutting room floor.Critics and audiences have largely dismissed this film with an indifferent shrug, and I can't say that I blame them.Grade: C

Legendary flop from director George Cuckor and stars Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and Edmund Gwenn concerns a young woman from Paris and her wily con-artist father taking it on the lam from police, eventually hitching up with a traveling vaudeville show with the girl disguised as a boy. Good-looking production based on Compton Mac Kenzie's book, but strident and shrill. Cuckor fails to modulate the scenes in a way that would endear these characters to the audience, and the resulting fiasco seems like an overly-quirky inside joke. Hepburn survives it with her sense of humor intact, but Grant is especially poor as a Cockney chap who gets involved with the sneaky twosome. A meandering, confounding misfire. *1/2 from ****

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.