The film Sylvia Scarlett (1935) underscores the truth that relying on stereotypes will lead to an incomplete understanding of anything.  Such assumptions can have some basis in fact, but never speak to the nuances of life.  The fact that this movie exists and was made at a time when Hollywood was clamping down on the products they screened for the public challenged even my trained perceptions of the era.  This came, too, at a time when Catholics exercised a great deal of control over cinema in the United States.  In a bid to show that they were just as stereotypically American as anyone else, they instituted through the Productions Codes, written by a Jesuit priest, all sorts of measures against the material you will find in this picture.  I will, of course, discuss that in a moment.  Before continuing, though, please keep in mind that I chose this simply to complete the series of Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn productions they starred in together.  What I got was unexpected.

Sylvia Scarlett’s (Katherine Hepburn) mother has died, and her father, Henry Scarlett (Edmund Gwenn), has gambled away all their family’s money.  Despite his irresponsibility, she remains devoted to him, offering the savings mom left for her marriage for their survival.  Henry declares this will be enough to get him to London where he is from and set up in . . . something.  He is not clear on the details, but he claims that he must go alone.  When Sylvia protests that she wants to accompany him, he reveals that he is going to smuggle valuable lace into England to sell, and her presence will only make him easier to track.  Her solution is to pose as a boy, cutting off her hair to complete the look and changing her name to Sylvester.  Thus, they take the next boat to the United Kingdom.  While in passage, they notice Jimmy Monkley (Cary Grant) closely eyeing them.  Henry fears that the items he is concealing are about to be discovered, but Sylvia follows Jimmy to ascertain the stranger’s intentions.  In the course of this light stalking, Jimmy throws away a piece of paper containing information on horse racing.  This gets Henry’s attention, though Sylvia begs him not to interact with this fellow.  Henry brushes her protests off, waiting until she is dealing with seasickness to slip away and strike up a conservation with Jimmy.  Before Sylvia can find the two men, Henry has already revealed what he has concealed to Jimmy.  It then should come as no surprise then that as Henry and Sylvia are going through customs, Jimmy tips off the inspections officer and the lace is confiscated.  A deflated Henry emerges from the office to join Sylvia on the train to London.  In their car, they happen to sit across from Jimmy, who offers them cash for what they lost and proposes that they go into business with one another.  “Business” is probably the wrong term since they plan on conning people out of their earnings.  Their first attempt comes with Sylvia posing as a destitute French boy supposedly not knowing any English and bereft of friends.  Jimmy arrives to stoke the sympathy, and Henry comes to translate.  Sylvia inadvertently spoils everything when she yells at a thief attempting to steal from their own pilfered cash, doing so in English.  Jimmy is angry, though he quickly comes up with the next con.  The newspaper advertises a wealthy family leaving for a long cruise (things were different then) and he happens to know the maid of the house, Maudie (Dennie Moore).  Henry and Jimmy go there, with Sylvia following later, and Jimmy talks Maudie into wearing a nice dress and jewelry of the estate’s mistress.  He then steals them off her, only to have Sylvia intervene to have the valuables returned so that Maudie will not get in trouble.  Maudie does not seem too fussed and agrees to go along with the next scheme: being a troupe of comedic performers wandering the English coastline in a caravan.  At their first performance, they are heckled by a local artist named Michael Fane (Brian Aherne).  Sylvia is defiant at this treatment and dares Michael to come on stage and do better.  He comes forward and is apologetic, asking them all to a party at his home after their show.  This assuages Sylvia, and she begins to fall in love with the dashing young painter.  These initial feelings are blunted somewhat when a female friend of his, Lily (Natalie Paley), shows up and Michael dotes on her.  The budding love is briefly rekindled as Lily acts cruelly towards Henry.  Henry is drunk, and then behaves boorishly towards Maudie with whom he is infatuated.  Henry, Jimmy, Maudie, and Sylvia are asked to leave, but Sylvia returns later to apologize.  This earns her an invitation back the next day.  Rather than come as a boy, she decides to reveal her true sex, much to Michael’s surprise.  Though he teases her a bit at first, he eventually comes around to seeing her beauty.  They would have continued to draw closer to one another had it not been for Lily’s untimely entrance.  Lily can tell that something is changing with Michael, but he starts kissing her, which is Sylvia’s cue to leave.  That night, Henry panics as he cannot find Maudie, eventually falling off a cliff to his death.  This leaves Jimmy and Sylvia together, and they are about to move on until they hear cries of help coming from the sea.  This is Lily trying to drown herself, and it is Sylvia who comes to her aid, Jimmy eventually assisting.  Sylvia goes to summon Michael, but when they return, they find the caravan gone with Jimmy and Lily.  In their pursuit of Jimmy and Lily, which is interrupted by some time in jail when Sylvia is mouthy with a police officer, Michael realizes his feelings for Sylvia are genuine.  As such, despite catching up with Jimmy and Lily on the train, Michael and Sylvia decide to get off together.  The last shot is of Jimmy laughing to himself to a shocked Lily as the others get away.

My synopsis of Sylvia Scarlett does not capture some of its strangeness, aside from Sylvia dressing as a boy.  That may not seem odd to a modern viewer, but it likely did not play well for audiences in the 1930s, contributing to it being a box office failure.  What I did not mention is that there is a moment when Maudie and Sylvia kiss, not to mention the gender bending aspects of the initial phase of Michael and Sylvia’s relationship.  Finally, Sylvia has to brusquely refuse Jimmy’s insistence that they sleep next to one another when he thinks she is a boy.  Pointedly, he refers to her as being a handy warm water bottle for the cold night, and I will let your imagination do the rest.  I would not let it go too far, though, especially if you are thinking of some kind of inappropriate Catholic joke.  What I found harder to understand was how the smooch between Maudie and Sylvia got past censors at that time.  Granted, it is in the guise of Sylvester that Maudie makes her advances on Sylvia.  It should also be remembered that such moments could theoretically be shown so long as they were not presented as normal behavior.  To those who reviewed and approved this movie in 1935, this must have met that theory.  As I discussed at the beginning of this paragraph, the film did not do well, losing a couple hundred thousand dollars.  Some of what I described must have been a bit too much for moviegoers in the 1930s despite Grant and Hepburn’s star power.  What I would add is that the Production Codes, which have their roots in Catholicism, tried to curtail this kind of material not solely because the Faith says that homosexuality is a sin.  Sin is a loaded word, but God’s love is greater.  Hence, there are alternatives in Church teaching for those struggling with same sex attraction.  Just know that God loves you.  With the movie, it is not trying to make a statement about gays or lesbians, but the same could not be said for the Production Codes.  Still, it is interesting to note this context because, as asserted in the introduction, Catholics were trying to fit into a society that saw them as foreign.

In that light, it may not be surprising that Sylvia Scarlett is set in Europe.  Like Catholicism, that is where strange ideas like women dressing as men came from, at least according to American culture broadly.  As an aside to this, the actress who played Lily, Natalie Paley, was a member of the Romanovs, the ruling family of Russia that were nearly all murdered after the Russian Revolution in 1917.  None of these means I recommend the movie, which is difficult to follow at times, but it gives it a depth if nothing else.