SYLVIA SCARLETT

To help her con artist father, a young woman pretends to be a man, learns the codes of masculinity, and seduces both men and women, whether dressed as a boy or a girl…

Nothing is shown, but everything is said in this transgressive story by the master of comedy of manners, George Cukor, carried by the androgynous grace of the legendary Katharine Hepburn, a model of independence and rejection of convention. The film was made in 1935 in Hollywood, where the Hays Code was in force, censoring “sexual perversions” in particular. Yet this comedy plays with gender identity and sexual preferences so skillfully that the censors didn’t see it coming…