Over the previous 50-plus years, movie historian Joseph McBride has been one of many nice chroniclers and analyzers of American administrators. His 1972 quantity on Orson Welles was one of many first important works on that nice filmmaker, and within the years since, he has revealed the definitive biographies of John Ford, Frank Capra, Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, and Steven Spielberg — together with a pair extra terrific books on Welles and among the finest tomes on screenwriting (“Writing in Photos”) ever written.
McBride has at all times been knowledgeable at discovering the intersection between biography and private expression, as rigorous in his analysis as he’s insightful in his visible and literary evaluation. Now, he has turned his eager eye towards director George Cukor, and the outcome, “George Cukor’s Individuals: Performing for a Grasp Director,” is considered one of McBride’s most progressive works thus far and indispensable for anybody not solely in Cukor however in directing typically.
Cukor’s expertise has at all times been extra elusive than that of Ford or Spielberg, administrators whose particular person kinds are clearer and extra visually oriented. Not that Cukor isn’t a visible director — it might be arduous to search out extra felicitous camerawork than in “My Honest Girl,” “Travels With My Aunt, or Cukor’s model of “A Star is Born.” However his visuals are so inextricably linked to efficiency that, generally, he’s dismissed as a mere “actor’s director” (as if being an amazing actor’s director is a negligible ability).
McBride possesses a ability that few of his friends can declare: a vocabulary for critically analyzing display appearing and the way its gestures and actions cohere with the director and cinematographer’s instruments. All through “George Cukor’s Individuals,” he makes the case for Cukor as a serious auteur by displaying how delicately Cukor directed his actors, after which by extension extrapolated a visible grammar from their performances. It’s a revelatory piece of essential biography, and the guide Cukor has lengthy deserved.
Amongst many different subjects, McBride explores how Cukor’s id as a closeted queer director knowledgeable his work, particularly when it got here to his 1935 romantic comedy “Sylvia Scarlett.” Disparaged upon its launch, “Sylvia Scarlett” can now be seen for the progressive and transgressive exploration of gender id that it at all times was — and on this unique excerpt from McBride’s guide, the creator makes a convincing case for its significance in Cukor’s filmography.
The beneath is excerpted from “George Cukor’s Individuals: Performing for a Grasp Director” by Joseph McBride, accessible from Columbia College Press in hardcover on January 21. The e book is now accessible.
“The little Pierrot boy! However have been you a woman dressed as a boy, or are you a boy dressed as a woman?”
That’s the central query, evidently unanswerable, raised by George Cukor’s most audacious movie, “Sylvia Scarlett” (1935). The title character, performed by Katharine Hepburn, spends a lot of the movie masquerading as a boy known as Sylvester Scarlett. She additionally makes awkward makes an attempt to behave as a younger lady, and each women and men are drawn to her as she explores her gender id. On this transgressive comedy, Cukor’s ode to his favourite actress with whom he made ten movies, Sylvia/Sylvester is nearer to what we all know of the particular Hepburn than even her Jo March in Cukor’s 1933 movie of Louisa Might Alcott’s “Little Girls.” Whereas that movie dramatizes Jo’s quest for independence from restrictive gender norms holding ladies again from totally satisfying lives, “Sylvia Scarlett” brings the subtexts explored in “Little Girls” proper out into the open, unmistakably so, because it proved with audiences on the time, who recoiled from this infamous flop. However this deliciously mischievous and profound comedy additionally layers subtext upon subtext upon subtext and treats the entire topic of gender norms playfully.
By far probably the most gender-bending movie both Cukor or Hepburn ever made and some of the outré works to ever emerge from a Hollywood studio, the lyrical “Sylvia Scarlett” is all shadings, an endlessly stunning movie that twists and turns vertiginously to problem each side of the viewers’s preconceptions about gender. It leaves us with a portrait of a daringly unconventional younger lady whose sexual id is nearly fully ambiguous, as, this movie implies, everybody’s is, if the reality be instructed.
“Sylvia Scarlett” was a pet challenge of Cukor and Hepburn at RKO, made attainable by the shock field workplace success of “Little Girls,” which emboldened them to go additional. However their transvestite fling obtained such a hostile response on the first preview in San Pedro, Cukor recalled, that after it, he and Hepburn instructed their producer, Pandro S. Berman, “Pan, let’s scrap this image and we’ll do an image for you for nothing.” And Berman replied, “completely significantly, ‘I hope to Christ I by no means see both of you once more!’” Berman ultimately cooled down however remained bitter about “Sylvia Scarlett,” calling it “a non-public promotional deal of Hepburn and Cukor; they conned me into it.”
As injury management earlier than the movie’s launch, the studio imposed an expository prologue of Sylvia and her alcoholic father, Henry (Edmund Gwenn), fleeing their house in Marseilles after her mom dies and Henry confesses he’s an embezzler. Imagining “Sylvia Scarlett” with out the prologue, filmed archly by Cukor and Hepburn, makes you understand what a good bolder movie it might have been if it had began as a substitute in medias res, with its foggy lengthy shot of a ship en path to England and introduction of Hepburn on deck in male apparel. She’s seen at first from behind and in silhouette, appearing elusive to hide her id. She tries to calm her anxious father below the hawkish gaze of a sinister-looking fellow initially seen in a shadowy full shot inspecting a handbill. He seems to be a brash Cockney conman, Jimmy Monkley (Cary Grant). Hepburn’s face is just steadily revealed after she geese right into a WC labeled “DAMES” and is expelled when a girl screams. It took me many viewings of “Sylvia Scarlett” earlier than I observed that Monkley, after getting into the ship’s lounge within the background of the scene and tossing the handbill within the trash, turns into suspicious of Sylvia’s disguise as she knocks over some silverware noisily. Whereas she enters the women’ room within the foreground, he briefly reappears by coming out of the lounge, spying on her. And after they meet within the lounge as Monkley is stealthily pumping her father about his smuggling, Monkley, below the quilt of macho bonhomie, tries to really feel her up and surreptitiously examine her chest unsuccessfully. He doesn’t let on to his suspicions for fairly some time, the higher to control her.
“Sylvia Scarlett” is an adaptation of a 1918 novel by Compton Mackenzie, “The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett.” A part of a trilogy by the prolific Scottish creator and political determine, the novel is about within the nineteenth century and, not like the movie, is meandering, irritatingly twee, and wearyingly lengthy. Whereas updating the story for the display, the screenwriters Gladys Unger, John Collier, and Mortimer Offner lower by means of the thicket to spotlight Sylvia’s role-playing and confusion about her gender id.
Collectively the screenwriters’ disparate abilities flowed easily into the synthesis of components that made “Sylvia Scarlett” so quirky, a becoming automobile 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 curiosity in Sylvia after being attracted by her when she is in male drag.
The movie’s delicate, somewhat unbelievable ambiance of London and the English countryside owes a lot to the cinematography by the masterful Joseph H. August. This artificiality of fashion helps convey the sensation of a wanton, freewheeling grownup fairy story. “Sylvia Scarlett” has a lot the identical whimsical attraction of the elevated poetic language of a Shakespearean comedy corresponding to “As You Like It,” which the movie evokes with Hepburn masquerading in male garb. That’s within the venerable theatrical custom of the various performs and operas with ladies in what was generally known as a breeches position, or Hosenrolle. Cukor referred to her characterization by the French time period for tomboy, garçonne. However movies often are anticipated to be extra “sensible” than the stage, and 1935 audiences already rattled by the sexual ambiguities in “Sylvia Scarlett” have been additional befuddled by its many and infrequently quicksilver adjustments of temper.
The movie pirouettes from suspenseful and prankish criminality to joyous musical frivolity, sexual recreation enjoying, and romantic abandon to the late passage that incongruously follows episodes of delirium tremens, near-drowning, and suicide with a comical automobile chase in a somewhat overextended denouement. However for individuals who can go together with what Cukor and Hepburn are doing right here, these dizzying temper adjustments seize the uneasy nature of Sylvia’s existence and the rollercoaster feeling of life being lived, particularly the offbeat existence hailed within the movie’s dedication “To the adventurer, to all who stray from the crushed path . . .”
When the ladies’s liberation motion took power within the late sixties, the time got here for “Sylvia Scarlett” to be rediscovered as a visionary movie about sexual ambiguity and, far forward of its time, even about what we now name nonbinary id. Each women and men present romantic or sexual curiosity in Sylvia/Sylvester, and the movie wittily and empathetically explores her feelings as a sexually ambiguous younger individual uncertain the best way to behave in both guise. A operating joke within the movie is that her tried confession that she’s truly a woman retains getting interrupted.
Whereas experimenting with female and male costuming and habits, Sylvia settles on what will be seen as a carefully balanced center course in coping with her gender id. Her conflicts are additionally a matter of attempting to find out her class id in such a fluid scenario. After she and her comrades endure humiliation by the hands of Michael and his upper-class bohemian buddies, Monkley advises her with bitter sarcasm, “Take it from me, it don’t do to step outta your clahs.” Although she initially is postpone by Monkley’s crass and untrustworthy method and habits, discovering him a “brute,” she turns into drawn to his instance as a devil-may-care rule-breaker. Monkley’s suspicions about Sylvia’s disguise develop as he tries to extend his maintain over her by seeming to courtroom her. However she continues to be postpone by his frequent cruelty.
A pivotal scene attribute of Cukor is the best way his characters bond by means of theatrical efficiency, in a joyous, marvelously choreographed and enacted little musical skit they spontaneously enact whereas invading a London mansion earlier than hitting the street. Once they burst into “By the Stunning Sea,” it’s a liberating celebration of their breaking away from standard society. The music offers them the concept to develop into artistes, the Pink Pierrots, on their seaside summer season tour because the scene dissolves to their two caravans rolling by means of the Cornish countryside. Their transition from con video games to theater could appear whimsically motivated, however there are deeper causes, for as Cukor’s biographer Patrick McGilligan noticed, in his movies “present enterprise is a sanctuary for the misfit, bathing all in an exquisite and forgiving mild. His deep feeling for all present folks was one which complemented his personal inside psychodrama—as somebody who (like an actor enjoying a job) was to reside one life onstage and one other backstage.”
Within the movie’s most complicated and deftly acted and directed sequence of scenes, Sylvia cycles by means of a beguilingly humorous and contradictory set of attitudes towards Aherne’s Michael, the bohemian artist, at his nation studio as she struggles to take care of her confused sexual emotions for him. A gentlemanly type, seductive however in a low-key means, he acts the a part of a cynical girls’ man however appears somewhat fey along with his wavy hair and mustache, robes and different dandyish outfits. Michael at coronary heart is dreamily romantic, however he’s additionally narcissistic and fickle and condescending towards her.
Late at evening, she involves see him wearing a person’s swimsuit and bowtie and fedora and climbs into his bed room window. Regardless of her boldness, she behaves defensively, in an excessively “girly” method, alternately flirtatious and shy, virtually revealing her secret. “I do know what it’s that offers me a queer feeling after I have a look at you,” Michael marvels, ostensibly referring to the androgynous impression she offers with the contradiction between her female method and her mannish apparel. When he invitations her to mattress with him for the evening (innocently sufficient, however with unconscious sexual vibes), she will get all giggly, saying with a smile, “No—I cahn’t,” and jumps out the window.
The amusing conceit is that Michael doesn’t totally see by means of her guise till she exhibits up once more the following day at his studio—whose extensive doorway and break up degree make it seem to be a theatrical stage—to pose for him in full girlish regalia. Sylvia’s shyness as she tries to show her slender determine accented by a flowery costume, whereas carrying a big solar hat she will hardly deal with because it falls from her head as she’s coming and going, is among the many most touching facets of the movie, since Hepburn in her delightfully witty efficiency comes off as extra awkward being a woman than she is being a boy.
And he or she could also be even lovelier as a boy than as a woman, though it’s ironic that in no matter guise, Hepburn is prettier in “Sylvia Scarlett” than maybe in some other of her Thirties movies, thanks partly to August’s sensitively molded lighting of her angular options. That helps make her an object of sexual attraction for 2 ladies as nicely, though she pointedly doesn’t reciprocate their advances. Their fellow participant Maudie (Dennie Moore) is shamelessly main on Sylvia’s more and more deluded father, however when she will get the younger lady alone, Maudie saucily remarks, “Your face is as easy as a woman’s” and attracts a mustache on her with an eyebrow pencil, prompting Sylvia to mimic Ronald Colman. However when Maudie roughly kisses her, the “younger man” pushes her away with the excuse, “I’ve—I’ve obtained a woman already.” Sylvia goes into w hat she thinks is her wagon however acts skittish when she finds Monkley undressing for mattress and suggesting, “Let’s curl up. . . . Hey, you’ll make a correct little scorching water bottle.” Monkley is slyly conniving to check his digital certitude that “Sylvester” is definitely a woman, inflicting her to panic and soar out of the wagon, dashing into the woods.
The opposite lady drawn to Sylvia is Lily, a complicated Russian (performed by an precise Romanov princess-in-exile, Natalie Paley) who’s Michael’s upper-class lover. Lily regards his odd younger companion with combined feelings of each jealousy and lust. She’s the one who provocatively asks Sylvia the vexing query, “However have been you a woman dressed as a boy, or are you a boy dressed as a woman?”
The enigmatic Lily coolly sizes up Sylvia as “such a reasonably boy! . . . How charming! How pretty she is” and kisses her. However Sylvia is shattered when she realizes Michael appears to want the extra worldly, skilled Lily and has solely been dallying together with her, calling her “a mere little one.” Cukor offers Sylvia a sequence of tightly framed, rawly emotional close-ups wherein she tearfully struggles together with her emotional confusion over this rebuff. Earlier she had confessed to Michael, “I can’t management myself. I by no means might.” Cukor’s characters typically lose management, in harmful and/or exhilarating methods, and sustaining management is commonly a problem for them of their precarious social conditions. Some fail disastrously, corresponding to Sylvia’s father when he goes mad and leaps to his demise, however the tightrope Sylvia/Sylvester is strolling calls for a rare diploma of management, and it takes her a lot of the movie to determine the best way to obtain it.
When Sylvia involves Michael’s studio in ladies’s clothes, she is exaggeratedly coquettish and awkward however pirouettes excitedly by herself whereas ready for him, arms to her cheeks, then with arms stretched excessive. He says, “Good heavens, boy, what are you as much as? Oh, I see! You’re actually a woman! I questioned why I used to be speaking to you as I did! [Laughs heartily] I say, I hope I didn’t say one thing to you I shouldn’t have.” She sits confusedly together with her legs unfold, making him chuckle and proper her habits. Cukor offers Hepburn tight close-ups to indicate Sylvia’s agonized response, tears brimming, to her failed girlishness. Michael pecks her chastely on her cheek however rapidly will get stimulated and tries to present her an actual kiss, however she pushes him away. Embarrassedly itemizing her supposed bodily flaws—uneven hairdo, plenty of freckles, large toes, unmanicured fingernails—she declares, “I—I’m impolite and tough and clumsy. I—I ought to have stayed as a boy. It’s all I’m match for.”
Michael teases her by placing on a girlish high-pitched voice earlier than declaring that he’ll train her “the tips of commerce” of femininity, including suggestively, with “all of the humorous bits.” Performing as a surrogate director, he sends Sylvia exterior to reenact her entrance after her first clumsy “rehearsal,” and this time her method is extra sleek as she performs femininity however continues to be exaggeratedly coquettish and synthetic. Although Michael appears largely heterosexual, his bohemian nature and effete facet put him comfortable along with his “queer” attraction to Sylvester, which amuses somewhat than threatens him and places her comfortable as nicely, in the end making them an appropriate couple. Though Sylvia seemingly has to decide on one id over one other on the finish of the movie (not less than quickly), and which may be partly the movie’s concession to the business market, it’s believable and significant for her to pair up with Michael, since each of them present flexibility about their sexuality.
What makes “Sylvia Scarlett” so enchanting and provocative all through is not only the cross-dressing however its eager sense—once more far forward of its time—that gender is a efficiency, one which needs to be realized and in the end needs to be questioned critically, as Sylvia does all through the movie earlier than trusting Michael sufficient to run away with him into the woods on the finish. The camp sensibility, which regularly 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 lifestyle (and within the droll tongue-in-cheek mockery of the imposed prologue). The flippantly closeted homosexual director and the extra deeply closeted bisexual Hepburn have been knowledgeable on the rituals and maneuvers of “passing” in their very own lives, so Sylvia’s masquerade was virtually second nature for them, even when it was way more overt than anything both dared to do earlier than or after on the display. Regardless of the anguish the damaging viewers reception for this audacious inventive journey brought on Cukor and Hepburn, the director recalled the filming with pleasure: “Each day was Christmas on the set.”