{"id":63458,"date":"2013-02-11T08:38:08","date_gmt":"2013-02-11T13:38:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=63458"},"modified":"2022-10-01T12:44:00","modified_gmt":"2022-10-01T16:44:00","slug":"the-wonderful-weird-wtf-ness-of-sylvia-scarlett","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=63458","title":{"rendered":"The Wonderful Weird WTF-Ness of Sylvia Scarlett<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nSylvia Scarlett<\/i> (1935, George Cukor) is such a weird movie. There. That is my critical assessment. <\/p>\n

Sylvia Scarlett<\/i> has a strange charm, a weird dark magic, and it’s one of those films I actually want to live<\/i> in. I want to crawl into the celluloid and hang out with those people. I want to be in that caravan and put on a Pierrot costume, and drive around in the fresh salty air, having meals under the starry sky. Dressed up as a boy. Being laughed at by the locals. Watching my father lose his mind. Well, maybe not that part of it.<\/p>\n

It stars Katharine Hepburn, in a pretty bad performance (she admitted to that as well) and Cary Grant, in a very good performance. This was before their famous pairing in Bringing Up Baby<\/i>, and pre-The Awful Truth<\/i>, which made Cary Grant a giant and important star. He had been around Hollywood for a bit, hired as a scratching-post for Mae West’s lady parts a couple of times, hired as an eye-candy boy-toy, and also a couple of pre-Code films where we start to see the Cary Grant persona emerge (Hot Saturday<\/i> and a few others). As we know, Cary Grant was, actually, English, and did, actually, speak with a Cockney accent, but he had gotten rid of that and acquired the “Cary Grant Voice” which was all his own creation. Here, in Sylvia Scarlett<\/i>, Cukor cast him as Jimmy Monkley, a Cockney con-man, complete with music hall songs, Cockney rhyming slang, and accent. A sort of amazing transformation occurred, and everyone realized it while it was happening. Cary Grant was not an unknown, but certainly nothing he had done up until that point had given us a glimpse that he was going to be the biggest movie star Hollywood had ever known. And you can’t tell in Sylvia Scarlett<\/i>, either, although it was, in many ways, the most important role in Cary Grant’s resume (then or after). It was the breakthrough. It made The Awful Truth<\/i> possible, and The Awful Truth<\/i> made all else possible. <\/p>\n

Cukor said, many years later:<\/p>\n

“Sylvia Scarlett” was the first time Cary felt the ground under his feet as an actor. He suddenly seemed liberated.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And Grant himself said:<\/p>\n

“Sylvia Scarlett” was my breakthrough. It permitted me to play a character I knew. Thanks to George Cukor. He let me play it the way I thought it should be played because he didn\u2019t know who the character was.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sylvia Scarlett<\/i> is exhilarating, seen in that context of Grant’s career. It is to watch someone become actualized as an actor. It’s to watch someone discover his own power, and discover that being himself<\/i> was all he had to do onscreen. <\/p>\n

“All”. As though that’s an easy thing. Don’t listen to anyone who scoffs about a performance, “He was just playing himself.” That person does not understand acting on the most elementary level, and doesn’t understand what it is, or how it works. It’s amazing how many critics use it as a negative. You spend your life watching movies, writing about movies, and you haven’t done your homework to actually understand the nuts and bolts of acting<\/em>? Balls! When someone says, “He was just playing himself”, he\/she usually means it as an insult, a dismissal, when actually what they are copping to (without knowing it) is that the actor in question is able to reliably and consistently bring himself<\/i> to the screen, and before you can do all of the other stuff (emotions, gestures, behavior, accents), you have to be able to do THAT. And many actors cannot do THAT at all.<\/p>\n

This whole “he was just playing himself” nonsense is one of my pet peeves, and it’s dismayingly common. John Wayne gets painted with that brush all the time<\/a>, and it’s a travesty. Seen beside Wayne’s power and authenticity as a persona (and that power\/authenticity lasted him for 40 years in his career), putting on fake accents and limping and “transforming” pale in comparison. Those things are “skills”, and necessary skills to be sure, but to dismiss a great actor like Wayne because that wasn’t his bag is to completely misunderstand what acting IS. Cary Grant also gets the “he was just playing himself” criticism – you know, his hair was always the same in his films, etc., his voice was the same, blah blah.<\/p>\n

But, as Mitchell Fain said so perfectly in my interview with him<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I mean, to this day, people say, \u201cOh so-and-so\u2019s the new Cary Grant.\u201d Cary Grant was acting in 1930. We\u2019re talking 70 years ago. Almost 80 years ago, and we\u2019re still referring to people as the \u201cnew Cary Grant\u201d. Well, guess what, there\u2019s no such thing. If 80 years later, you\u2019re still trying to find someone to be the next so-and-so, there is nobody. It\u2019s only him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That is the potential staying power of someone who can convincingly “play himself” onscreen.<\/p>\n

Beautifully, Cary Grant himself answered the “just playing himself” criticism, in words insightful and true:<\/p>\n

To play yourself \u2014 your true self \u2014 is the hardest thing in the world. Watch people at a party. They\u2019re playing themselves \u2026 but nine out of ten times the image they adopt for themselves is the wrong one.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Amen, Archie. <\/p>\n

However, it is important to remember that an actor cannot “play himself” in a vacuum. Like everything else in the whimsical and sometimes cruel career of acting, you really need the Role to set you free and highlight you. You need a role that will show people who you are, what you can do. It’s always interesting to see Cary Grant in those Mae West movies. There are certain signatures there: the stiff ramrod walk, the tall sleek gorgeousness, but any beautiful man could have played those roles. There’s one glimpse of the Movie Star in Waiting in She Done Him Wrong<\/i>, with his sudden burst of primal naughtiness in the final moment when he leans in to kiss Mae West, growling, “You bad girl<\/i> …” It’s sexy as hell. <\/p>\n

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