Sylvia Scarlett was made after Alice Adams. Hepburn still had her early-ca­reer gaucheness, and here tomboy Hep­burn emerged in full gender-crossover flower – and not incidentally, on her way to becoming a key figure in 21st-century queer studies. Sylvia as Sylvester is utter­ly her/himself as a boy on the lam with disgraced father (Edmund Gwenn). She joins up with Cockney con artist Cary Grant (the first of their pairings), and the two are at their most daunting­ly athletic, as they dance and pratfall through the strangely varying moods of the film. Grant wasn’t yet a star and it’s suave Brian Aherne who wins the lady fair. We feel a pang of loss when Sylvester transitions back to a girl in this plangent comedy of identity confusion, which is itself an eccentric film that is amusingly confused as to where on the spectrum its protagonist belongs.

Molly Haskell

The gender-swap cross-dressing come­dy Sylvia Scarlett is the only Katharine Hepburn/Cary Grant film (out of four teamings) that had a disastrous premiere when it originally came out. Today –per­haps with the hindsight knowledge that director George Cukor was gay – it en­joys a much stronger cult following.

When the Marseilles-based Sylvia (Hepburn) loses her mother and discov­ers that her father (Edmund Gwenn) is a gambler and embezzler, she cuts her hair, dresses as a young man, and flees with him to England. Now calling her­self Sylvester, she/he meets the footloose conman Jimmy Monkley (Cary Grant), who suggests they join forces and pull off some tricks together. Their con acts go awry, and they end up as travelling ac­tors, but soon Jimmy discovers Sylvester’s secret.

With characters shifting shape in every reel, the film is about the art of self-reinvention, especially in gender terms. At first, Hepburn plays a weepy, naïve girl, but the moment she adopts male attire, she finds her footing and self-confidence. She becomes quick-wit­ted, tough-yet-tender, sprightly – the film’s main redeeming facet since 1935. However, the film’s amorphous approach to its droll (if highly absurd) premise, along with its rudimentary script leaves something to be desired. The resulting shifts in tone can be confusing. Had the film been made just two years earlier, it might have enjoyed greater freedom to explore the comical and sexual aspects of gender-swapping in a more risqué man­ner. Still, there are moments of double entendre and a scene in which a girl paints a Ronald Colman moustache on Hepburn and can’t resist stealing a kiss.

Hepburn is a delight to watch, effort­lessly shifting between coyness, alacrity and fidgety idealism, as if pushing but­tons at will and choreographing her own version of masculinity, just as skilfully as she embodies the awkwardness and vul­nerability of her female side.

Ehsan Khoshbakht