Sylvia Scarlet: Great Movie? No!!! Great Camp? Maybe.

 

 

 

 

SYLVIA SCARLETT (1935)

Directed by George Cukor

RKO, 91 minutes

★  (add stars if you like camp)

 

I watched the 1935 movie Sylvia Scarlett with the intent of writing about actors breaking gender roles. Who could resist seeing a movie with Katharine Hepburn in drag? Pretty much everyone! It was a bomb in 1935 and has aged about as well as an apple rotting in an orchard. When famed director George Cukor saw the rushes he begged RKO not to release it. It was so bad that he (unsuccessfully) promised to direct another film for free if they’d trash Sylvia Scarlett.

 

Nonetheless, there are reasons to review it. You may have heard that Katharine Hepburn–now considered a Hollywood legend–once had trouble getting roles. She was pegged as “box office poison and this was the picture that earned that baggage. If  you’ve ever heard the phrase so bad I couldn’t look away, that sums up Sylvia Scarlett. My wife and I constantly remarked, “This is incredibly bad. Should we turn it off?” I even interjected, “Good heavens! Why are we watching this?” Yet, both of us stayed to the putrid end. Without intending to be so, it’s the very definition of camp.

 

It was the first time Hepburn and Cary Grant were in the same movie. Neither could blame it on youth; Grant was 31 at the time and Hepburn 28. The putative story is distilled from two 1918 novels from Compton MacKenzie. Sylvia (Hepburn) is the pigtailed daughter of widower Henry Scarlett (Edmund Gwenn), a gambler. His profligacy bankrupted him to the point where he is being pursued by thugs poised to relieve his debt mob-style. Henry throws clothing into a bag with the intention of hightailing it to France with money and 30 yards of lace he stole from his firm. Sylvia intends to go with him. When Henry insists he’d be an easy mark if traveling with his daughter, she offers money her mother left her and impetuously chops off her pigtails and announces she will be “Sylvester.” A little tidying up and she passes as a teenage boy (sort of like a shaved cocoanut could conceivably pass as an ostrich egg).

 

On the voyage they meet Jimmy Monkley (Grant), a Cockney (ahem!) gentleman. Sylvania/Sylvester smells a rat, but Henry tells Jimmy of his plan for the lace. Henry learns the hard way that Monkley is a grifter in fancy duds. When the boat lands and Monkley fingers Henry so he can get off the boat without being searched for the jewels he stole. Once ashore via unlikely circumstances, the trio decide to work cons as a team. Sylvester blows the first attempt, but Monkley leads them to a mansion whose owners are on a trip. Jimmy, though, knows Maudie (Dennie Moore) the maid. At this point, abandon all logic. After several hours of guzzling the owners’ booze and playing dress-up with their finery and valuables, Sylvester makes Jimmy leave the pearls he stole lest Maudie risk arrest and they vamoose.  

 

Henry is besotted with Maudie, so the trio becomes a quartet. They set off as a traveling troupe of entertainers to bilk country bumpkins. Where did they get the truck and stage? Don’t ask. Likewise forget about Grant’s variable accent. Or whether Hepburn convinces as a snooty teen. “Sylvester” catches the eye of playboy artist, Michael Fane (Brien Aherne) who wants to paint his/her face. Fane invites her to pose at his villa after an odd encounter that implies Fane swings both ways. But she takes the guesswork away by showing up the next day in a dress and bonnet she stole from a beach bather.

 

Sylvia is smitten but is crushed when Lily (Natalie Paley) shows up. Lily is Fane’s sort of girlfriend, but is basically a mean-spirited sot who tells Henry that his love, Maudie, has run off with another man. A distraught Henry drowns himself, though Maudie is rescued from the ocean and from the film. After we play a game of who’s with whom–Jimmy is attracted to Lily–this mess plops into the sickness bucket and ends. It is so bad that the actors playing Maudie and Lily were uncredited. Lucky them.

 

Three years later the Hepburn/Grant combo made Bringing Up Baby, one of the greatest comedies of all time. Who says there are no second chances? It’s just possible, though, that you’ll laugh harder at Sylvia Scarlett.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

The Black Wolf: Thriller or Bummer?

 

 

 

THE BLACK WOLF  (2025)

By Louise Penny

Minotaur Books, 370 pages.

★★★

 

 I have a dilemma. I’m a huge Louise Penny fan who devours her work like a starving man at a banquet table. That said, objectively her work has taken a darker turn in the past few years that makes it less satisfying as it once was. I say this not as one of those rabid fans who wants every book to frolic on the green in Three Pines and whilst uttering witticisms with friends and enjoying wholesome moments in the village. I still find Penny a compelling writer, but I’m not fond of the transformation of her central character: Armand Gamache.

 

Penny’s mysteries are character-centered, but recent works have been more action-driven and violent. Gamache has become harder and cynical about most things that don’t relate to the residents of Three Pines and his immediate family. In addition, though Penny’s plots have grown more complex, the tone of her books has drifted further from the mystery category and into thriller territory. This may make them enormously popular, but I find them less likable.

 

The Black Wolf is the sequel to The Grey Wolf, which definitely should be read first. As was discovered at the end of The Grey Wolf, Gamache, his son-in-law Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and Isabelle Lacoste, Gamache’s post-retirement successor as head of the Sûreté du Québec, thought they had jailed the “Black” Wolf by breaking a plot to kill hundreds of thousands by poisoning Montreal’s water supply. They did so based on their reading of a notebook and piecing together evidence that allowed the investing team to stop the massacre. Upon further reflection, though, Gamache realized that the “wolf,” Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, was not the Black Wolf at all. In the Cree legend that names both books, the Black Wolf is evil and the Grey Wolf is one of kindness and compassion. Lauzon insisted he was framed and Gamache considers it a possibility. He even secures Lauzon’s temporary release from prison and brings him into his home to celebrate Christmas, though Reine-Marie is appalled for reasons beyond the fact that Lauzon is more an arrogant prig than grateful.

 

The first revelation is that another notebook exists that details an evil far worse the one Gamache, et. al. first found. That notebook, an ambiguous map, and a cryptic semi-warning of “a dry and parched land where there is no water…” leads Gamache on a mission to delay a plan that some believe is inevitable. In fact, there are those who would implement it in the name of preventing an even greater catastrophe. Herein lies a paradox; in the Cree belief system, the grey and black are equally necessary to keep the world in balance; in Gamache’s world view, the black wolf must be destroyed.

 

There is a sense in which what Penny is dealing with is more in line with a Star Trek scenario than something appropriate for a retired chief of the Sûreté. Who is the black wolf? Crime investigators are trained to pursue individuals. The Black Wolf is filled with bad actors, but who are they? Organized crime? Crooked cops? Governments? International villains? All of the preceding? The black wolf has the characteristics of a massive conspiracy that is beyond borders and beyond individuals. Who gets taken down and how does one decide? The parched land reference is from Psalm 63, but what does it mean nearly 4,000 years later?

 

Had The Black Wolf been written decades earlier, it would have been dismissed as preposterous. The “ouch” moment of the novel in 2025 is that it’s distressingly easy to imagine the events described in the novel as feasible. One hopes that they aren’t, but the immediate question is whether Ms. Penny has written one big bummer of a novel that takes Armand Gamache too far from the determined optimism of previous works. Saying more would risk spoilers, but I will note that a key moment in the book rests upon Gamache deliberately telling a lie. This violates one of his four paths to obtaining wisdom, admitting “I was wrong.”

 

A final note is that in the last two novels Canada’s Liberal Party has taken it on the chin. Does that mean anything?

 

Rob Weir