Critics reviews

The film that best and most explicitly exploits her appealing androgyny, Sylvia Scarlett allows Hepburn to be one of her best selves.

The "theatrical line" and the "queer feeling," all part of the artiste's palette... Sudden shifts are the norm in this moonstruck realm ("Au Clair de la Lune" is a melodic leitmotif), champagne euphoria gives way to a plunge off the seaside cliff—"One sensation after another," that's the Cukor approach with its frisky tempo and its flavorful swaths of Shakespeare and Leoncavallo. No less the auteur, Hepburn keenly rides the continuous sense of play and confrontationally stretches her persona.

It has a strange charm, a weird dark magic, and it's one of those films I actually want to live in. I want to crawl into the celluloid and hang out with those people. I want to be in that caravan and put on a Pierrot costume, and drive around in the fresh salty air, having meals under the starry sky.

Hepburn's flirtations with the two male leads (including Cary Grant) yield unexpected and emotionally resonant complications. It should be noted, however, that Cukor was embarrassed of the film, considering its transgressions to be accidents, a result of nobody in the production knowing quite what they wanted. Regardless, it's still one-of-a-kind, recklessly independent of Hollywood conventions in a way few other movies of the period are

The ambiguous sexual feelings that Hepburn as a boy stirs in both Grant and Brian Aherne (an aristocratic artist) are part of what makes this film so subversive. Genre shifts match gender shifts as the film disconcertingly changes tone every few minutes, from farce to tragedy to romance to crime thriller—rather like the French New Wave films that were to come a quarter century later—as Cukor's fascination with theater and the talents of his cast somehow hold it all together.

Long considered one of George Cukor's strangest pictures with Katharine Hepburn (they made A Bill of Divorcement and Little Women to much success), Sylvia Scarlett was a bomb upon release. But it's really something of a complicated masterpiece -- an early act of sexual subversion that found Cukor's Kate in drag, and, in one of the picture's more unforgettable scenes, kissing another woman.

When [Gavin] Lambert expresses "wonder" regarding "why there was such a terrible controversy over something very charming and very lightweight," he's possibly overlooking the film's almost schizoid shifts between that ethereal surface charm and some other darker, heavier, disturbing undercurrents. (2) Indeed, what haunts this sunny, picaresque romance, and its often delectable dalliances in gender-identity, is the spectre of a gritty, disconcertingly cynical psychodrama.