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 “as 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. This 1935 film was made in Hollywood, where the Hays Code was in force, censoring “sexual perversions” in particular. Despite that, this comedy plays with gender identity and sexual preferences so skillfully that the censors saw nothing coming…