It was Hepburn’s first movie with Cary Grant. The two would later go on to great success in Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story, so it’s odd that this outing stumbled so severely. As critic David Thomson writes, “Sylvia Scarlett was attacked by every critic in town, and it found no audience.” A tale of a woman who has to masquerade as a man in order to escape the police alongside her con-artist father, Sylvia is most criticized because of the feasibility factor: there really is no way that anyone could ever mistake Hepburn for a man, no matter how short her hair. But that really doesn’t matter, because it’s precisely when Hepburn plays “Sylvester” that she gets to play with that tiny bit of masculinity that has always flickered at her edges. It is an unjustly pilloried performance.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciODYji23kk]