Over the past 50-plus years, film historian Joseph McBride has been one of the great chroniclers and analyzers of American directors. His 1972 volume on Orson Welles was one of the first essential works on that great filmmaker, and in the years since, he has published the definitive biographies of John Ford, Frank Capra, Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, and Steven Spielberg — along with a couple more terrific books on Welles and one of the best tomes on screenwriting (“Writing in Pictures”) ever written.
McBride has always been expert at finding the intersection between biography and personal expression, as rigorous in his research as he is insightful in his visual and literary analysis. Now, he has turned his keen eye toward director George Cukor, and the result, “George Cukor’s People: Acting for a Master Director,” is one of McBride’s most innovative works to date and indispensable for anyone interested not only in Cukor but in directing in general.
Cukor’s talent has always been more elusive than that of Ford or Spielberg, directors whose individual styles are clearer and more visually oriented. Not that Cukor isn’t a visual director — it would be hard to find more felicitous camerawork than in “My Fair Lady,” “Travels With My Aunt, or Cukor’s version of “A Star is Born.” But his visuals are so inextricably linked to performance that, sometimes, he is dismissed as a mere “actor’s director” (as if being a great actor’s director is a negligible skill).
McBride possesses a skill that few of his peers can claim: a vocabulary for critically analyzing screen acting and how its gestures and movements cohere with the director and cinematographer’s tools. Throughout “George Cukor’s People,” he makes the case for Cukor as a major auteur by showing how delicately Cukor directed his actors, and then by extension extrapolated a visual grammar from their performances. It’s a revelatory piece of critical biography, and the book Cukor has long deserved.
Among many other topics, McBride explores how Cukor’s identity as a closeted queer director informed his work, especially when it came to his 1935 romantic comedy “Sylvia Scarlett.” Disparaged upon its release, “Sylvia Scarlett” can now be seen for the innovative and transgressive exploration of gender identity that it always was — and in this exclusive excerpt from McBride’s book, the author makes a convincing case for its importance in Cukor’s filmography.
The below is excerpted from “George Cukor’s People: Acting for a Master Director” by Joseph McBride, available from Columbia University Pressin hardcover on January 21. The ebook is now available.
“The little Pierrot boy! But were you a girl dressed as a boy, or are you a boy dressed as a girl?”
That’s the central question, evidently unanswerable, raised by George Cukor’s most audacious film, “Sylvia Scarlett” (1935). The title character, played by Katharine Hepburn, spends much of the film masquerading as a boy called Sylvester Scarlett. She also makes awkward attempts to behave as a young woman, and both men and women are attracted to her as she explores her gender identity. In this transgressive comedy, Cukor’s ode to his favorite actress with whom he made ten films, Sylvia/Sylvester is closer to what we know of the actual Hepburn than even her Jo March in Cukor’s 1933 film of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women.” While that film dramatizes Jo’s quest for independence from restrictive gender norms holding women back from fully satisfying lives, “Sylvia Scarlett” brings the subtexts explored in “Little Women” right out into the open, unmistakably so, as it proved with audiences at the time, who recoiled from this notorious flop. But this deliciously mischievous and profound comedy also layers subtext upon subtext upon subtext and treats the whole subject of gender norms playfully.
By far the most gender-bending film either Cukor or Hepburn ever made and one of the most outré works to ever emerge from a Hollywood studio, the lyrical “Sylvia Scarlett” is all shadings, an endlessly surprising film that twists and turns vertiginously to challenge every aspect of the audience’s preconceptions about gender. It leaves us with a portrait of a daringly unconventional young woman whose sexual identity is almost entirely ambiguous, as, this film implies, everyone’s is, if the truth be told.
“Sylvia Scarlett” was a pet project of Cukor and Hepburn at RKO, made possible by the surprise box office success of “Little Women,” which emboldened them to go further. But their transvestite fling received such a hostile response at the first preview in San Pedro, Cukor recalled, that after it, he and Hepburn told their producer, Pandro S. Berman, “Pan, let’s scrap this picture and we’ll do a picture for you for nothing.” And Berman replied, “perfectly seriously, ‘I hope to Christ I never see either of you again!’” Berman eventually cooled down but remained bitter about “Sylvia Scarlett,” calling it “a private promotional deal of Hepburn and Cukor; they conned me into it.”
As damage control before the film’s release, the studio imposed an expository prologue of Sylvia and her alcoholic father, Henry (Edmund Gwenn), fleeing their home in Marseilles after her mother dies and Henry confesses he is an embezzler. Imagining “Sylvia Scarlett” without the prologue, filmed archly by Cukor and Hepburn, makes you realize what an even bolder film it would have been if it had started instead in medias res, with its foggy long shot of a boat en route to England and introduction of Hepburn on deck in male attire. She’s seen at first from behind and in silhouette, acting elusive to conceal her identity. She tries to calm her anxious father under the hawkish gaze of a sinister-looking fellow initially seen in a shadowy full shot inspecting a handbill. He turns out to be a brash Cockney conman, Jimmy Monkley (Cary Grant). Hepburn’s face is only gradually revealed after she ducks into a WC labeled “DAMES” and is expelled when a woman screams. It took me many viewings of “Sylvia Scarlett” before I noticed that Monkley, after entering the ship’s lounge in the background of the scene and tossing the handbill in the trash, becomes suspicious of Sylvia’s disguise as she knocks over some silverware noisily. While she enters the ladies’ room in the foreground, he briefly reappears by popping out of the lounge, spying on her. And when they meet in the lounge as Monkley is stealthily pumping her father about his smuggling, Monkley, under the cover of macho bonhomie, tries to feel her up and surreptitiously inspect her chest unsuccessfully. He doesn’t let on to his suspicions for quite a while, the better to manipulate her.
“Sylvia Scarlett” is an adaptation of a 1918 novel by Compton Mackenzie, “The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett.” Part of a trilogy by the prolific Scottish author and political figure, the novel is set in the nineteenth century and, unlike the film, is meandering, irritatingly twee, and wearyingly long. While updating the story for the screen, the screenwriters Gladys Unger, John Collier, and Mortimer Offner cut through the thicket to highlight Sylvia’s role-playing and confusion about her gender identity.
Together the screenwriters’ disparate talents flowed smoothly into the synthesis of elements that made “Sylvia Scarlett” so quirky, a fitting vehicle for the offbeat fancies of Cukor and Hepburn, whose character is wonderingly described as “you oddity . . . you freak of nature” by a bohemian artist, Michael Fane (Brian Aherne), who takes a romantic interest in Sylvia after being attracted by her when she is in male drag.
The film’s delicate, rather fantastic atmosphere of London and the English countryside owes much to the cinematography by the masterful Joseph H. August. This artificiality of style helps convey the feeling of a wanton, freewheeling adult fairy tale. “Sylvia Scarlett” has much the same whimsical charm of the elevated poetic language of a Shakespearean comedy such as “As You Like It,” which the film evokes with Hepburn masquerading in male garb. That is in the venerable theatrical tradition of the many plays and operas with women in what was known as a breeches role, or Hosenrolle. Cukor referred to her characterization by the French term for tomboy, garçonne. But films usually are expected to be more “realistic” than the stage, and 1935 audiences already rattled by the sexual ambiguities in “Sylvia Scarlett” were further befuddled by its many and often quicksilver changes of mood.
The film pirouettes from suspenseful and prankish criminality to joyous musical frivolity, sexual game playing, and romantic abandon to the late passage that incongruously follows episodes of delirium tremens, near-drowning, and suicide with a comical car chase in a rather overextended denouement. But for those who can go along with what Cukor and Hepburn are doing here, those dizzying mood changes capture the uneasy nature of Sylvia’s existence and the rollercoaster feeling of life being lived, especially the offbeat existence hailed in the film’s dedication “To the adventurer, to all who stray from the beaten path . . .”
When the women’s liberation movement took force in the late sixties, the time came for “Sylvia Scarlett” to be rediscovered as a visionary film about sexual ambiguity and, far ahead of its time, even about what we now call nonbinary identity. Both men and women show romantic or sexual interest in Sylvia/Sylvester, and the film wittily and empathetically explores her emotions as a sexually ambiguous young person unsure how to behave in either guise. A running joke in the film is that her attempted confession that she’s actually a girl keeps getting interrupted.
While experimenting with male and female costuming and behavior, Sylvia settles on what can be seen as a delicately balanced middle course in dealing with her gender identity. Her conflicts are also a matter of trying to determine her class identity in such a fluid situation. After she and her comrades undergo humiliation at the hands of Michael and his upper-class bohemian friends, Monkley advises her with bitter sarcasm, “Take it from me, it don’t do to step outta your clahs.” Though she initially is put off by Monkley’s crass and untrustworthy manner and behavior, finding him a “brute,” she becomes drawn to his example as a devil-may-care rule-breaker. Monkley’s suspicions about Sylvia’s disguise develop as he tries to increase his hold over her by seeming to court her. But she continues to be put off by his frequent cruelty.
A pivotal scene characteristic of Cukor is the way his characters bond through theatrical performance, in a joyous, marvelously choreographed and enacted little musical skit they spontaneously enact while invading a London mansion before hitting the road. When they burst into “By the Beautiful Sea,” it’s a liberating celebration of their breaking away from conventional society. The song gives them the idea to become artistes, the Pink Pierrots, on their seaside summer tour as the scene dissolves to their two caravans rolling through the Cornish countryside. Their transition from con games to theater may seem whimsically motivated, but there are deeper reasons, for as Cukor’s biographer Patrick McGilligan observed, in his films “show business is a sanctuary for the misfit, bathing all in a beautiful and forgiving light. His deep feeling for all show people was one that complemented his own interior psychodrama—as someone who (like an actor playing a role) was to live one life onstage and another behind the curtain.”
In the film’s most complex and deftly acted and directed series of scenes, Sylvia cycles through a beguilingly funny and contradictory set of attitudes toward Aherne’s Michael, the bohemian artist, at his country studio as she struggles to deal with her confused sexual feelings for him. A gentlemanly sort, seductive but in a low-key way, he acts the part of a cynical ladies’ man but seems rather fey with his wavy hair and mustache, robes and other dandyish outfits. Michael at heart is dreamily romantic, but he is also narcissistic and fickle and condescending toward her.
Late at night, she comes to see him dressed in a man’s suit and bowtie and fedora and climbs into his bedroom window. Despite her boldness, she behaves defensively, in an excessively “girly” manner, alternately flirtatious and shy, almost revealing her secret. “I know what it is that gives me a queer feeling when I look at you,” Michael marvels, ostensibly referring to the androgynous impression she gives with the contradiction between her feminine manner and her mannish attire. When he invites her to bed with him for the night (innocently enough, but with subconscious sexual vibes), she gets all giggly, saying with a grin, “No—I cahn’t,” and jumps out the window.
The amusing conceit is that Michael doesn’t fully see through her guise until she shows up again the next day at his studio—whose wide doorway and split level make it seem like a theatrical stage—to pose for him in full girlish regalia. Sylvia’s shyness as she tries to display her slender figure accented by a flowery dress, while wearing a large sun hat she can hardly handle as it falls from her head as she’s coming and going, is among the most touching aspects of the film, since Hepburn in her delightfully witty performance comes off as more awkward being a girl than she is being a boy.
And she may be even lovelier as a boy than as a girl, although it’s ironic that in whatever guise, Hepburn is prettier in “Sylvia Scarlett” than perhaps in any other of her 1930s films, thanks in part to August’s sensitively molded lighting of her angular features. That helps make her an object of sexual attraction for two women as well, although she pointedly does not reciprocate their advances. Their fellow player Maudie (Dennie Moore) is shamelessly leading on Sylvia’s increasingly deluded father, but when she gets the young woman alone, Maudie saucily remarks, “Your face is as smooth as a girl’s” and draws a mustache on her with an eyebrow pencil, prompting Sylvia to imitate Ronald Colman. But when Maudie roughly kisses her, the “young man” pushes her away with the excuse, “I’ve—I’ve got a girl already.” Sylvia goes into w hat she thinks is her wagon but acts skittish when she finds Monkley undressing for bed and suggesting, “Let’s curl up. . . . Hey, you’ll make a proper little hot water bottle.” Monkley is slyly conniving to test his virtual certitude that “Sylvester” is actually a girl, causing her to panic and jump out of the wagon, dashing into the woods.
The other woman attracted to Sylvia is Lily, a sophisticated Russian (played by an actual Romanov princess-in-exile, Natalie Paley) who is Michael’s upper-class lover. Lily regards his odd young companion with mixed emotions of both jealousy and lust. She’s the one who provocatively asks Sylvia the vexing question, “But were you a girl dressed as a boy, or are you a boy dressed as a girl?”
The enigmatic Lily coolly sizes up Sylvia as “such a pretty boy! . . . How charming! How lovely she is” and kisses her. But Sylvia is shattered when she realizes Michael seems to prefer the more worldly, experienced Lily and has only been dallying with her, calling her “a mere child.” Cukor gives Sylvia a series of tightly framed, rawly emotional close-ups in which she tearfully struggles with her emotional confusion over this rebuff. Earlier she had confessed to Michael, “I can’t control myself. I never could.” Cukor’s characters often lose control, in dangerous and/or exhilarating ways, and maintaining control is often a challenge for them in their precarious social situations. Some fail disastrously, such as Sylvia’s father when he goes mad and leaps to his death, but the tightrope Sylvia/Sylvester is walking demands an extraordinary degree of control, and it takes her most of the film to figure out how to achieve it.
When Sylvia comes to Michael’s studio in women’s clothing, she is exaggeratedly coquettish and awkward but pirouettes excitedly by herself while waiting for him, hands to her cheeks, then with arms stretched high. He says, “Good heavens, boy, what are you up to? Oh, I see! You’re really a girl! I wondered why I was talking to you as I did! [Laughs heartily] I say, I hope I didn’t say something to you I shouldn’t have.” She sits confusedly with her legs spread, making him laugh and correct her behavior. Cukor gives Hepburn tight close-ups to show Sylvia’s agonized reaction, tears brimming, to her failed girlishness. Michael pecks her chastely on her cheek but quickly gets stimulated and tries to give her a real kiss, but she pushes him away. Embarrassedly itemizing her supposed bodily flaws—choppy hairdo, lots of freckles, big feet, unmanicured fingernails—she declares, “I—I’m rude and rough and clumsy. I—I should have stayed as a boy. It’s all I’m fit for.”
Michael teases her by putting on a girlish high-pitched voice before declaring that he will teach her “the tricks of trade” of femininity, adding suggestively, with “all the funny bits.” Acting as a surrogate director, he sends Sylvia outside to reenact her entrance after her first clumsy “rehearsal,” and this time her manner is more graceful as she performs femininity but is still exaggeratedly coquettish and artificial. Though Michael seems mostly heterosexual, his bohemian nature and effete side put him at ease with his “queer” attraction to Sylvester, which amuses rather than threatens him and puts her at ease as well, ultimately making them a suitable couple. Although Sylvia seemingly has to choose one identity over another at the end of the film (at least temporarily), and that may be in part the film’s concession to the commercial marketplace, it is plausible and meaningful for her to pair up with Michael, since both of them show flexibility about their sexuality.
What makes “Sylvia Scarlett” so enchanting and provocative throughout is not just the cross-dressing but its keen sense—again far ahead of its time—that gender is a performance, one that has to be learned and ultimately should be questioned critically, as Sylvia does throughout the film before trusting Michael enough to run away with him into the woods at the end. The camp sensibility, which often manifests itself in Cukor’s work, is at its strongest in “Sylvia Scarlett,” with its unabashed gayness, elaborate role-playing, and sense of theatricality as a way of life (and in the droll tongue-in-cheek mockery of the imposed prologue). The lightly closeted gay director and the more deeply closeted bisexual Hepburn were expert at the rituals and maneuvers of “passing” in their own lives, so Sylvia’s masquerade was almost second nature for them, even if it was far more overt than anything else either dared to do before or after on the screen. Despite the anguish the negative audience reception for this audacious artistic adventure caused Cukor and Hepburn, the director recalled the filming with pleasure: “Every day was Christmas on the set.”
