Sylvia Scarlett
With “Bringing Up Baby”, “Holiday”, “The Philadelphia Story” and this film, I think I have seen all Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant cooperations, making them my most watched couple of their time. And boy they are great together. When Gorp recommended “Sylvia Scarlett” almost a year ago, he never said it was going to be with Cary Grant. Well, that is not surprising. The whole story was not supposed to be about her and Grant’s character, and you can still see how Cary Grant wasn’t as developed as an actor at the time. Their chemistry is okayish at best, very different from “Bringing Up Baby” and “Holiday”.
In fact, just like Gorp said, the highlight of the film is definitely Katharine Hepburn’s cross-dressing, and she is indeed even more fierce than she was in “Bringing Up Baby”. It’s probably her best role yet, and this boyishness suits her perfectly. Just for that, the film was worth seeing.
On second thought, however, the film was not all that special. Its silly singing-and-dancing scenes were very reminiscent of “Holiday” – it seems like the film lives in its own little bubble in which characters can break into laughter and jest at all times, and entertain the audience purely by doing so. Of course the film is lovely, but it is strangely lacking the Lubitsch or Schnitzler smarts in its dialogue. The characters are a lot of fun, but quite one-dimensional and dumb, mostly either purely good or purely bad, leaving no identification potential whatsoever.
As a Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant fan, the film was an obvious must-see, and it did not disappoint. In general, however, I think “Bringing Up Baby” was still their best film together.