Sylvia Scarlett

Sylvia Scarlett is a 1935 romantic comedy film starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, based on The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett, a novel by Compton MacKenzie. Directed by George Cukor, it was notorious as one of the most famous unsuccessful movies of the 1930s. Hepburn plays the title role of Sylvia Scarlett, a female con artist masquerading as a boy to escape the police. The success of the subterfuge is in large part due to the transformation of Hepburn by RKO makeup artist Mel Berns.

Sylvia Scarlett Katharine Hepburn and her father, Henry Edmund Gwenn, flee France one step ahead of the police. Henry, while employed as a bookkeeper for a lace factory, was discovered to be an embezzler. While on the channel ferry, they meet a gentleman adventurer, Jimmy Monkley Cary Grant, who partners with them in his con games.After a disastrous test screening, Cukor and Hepburn reportedly begged producer Pandro Berman to shelve the picture if they agreed to make their next film for free. According to RKO records, the film lost a whopping 363,000, and thus began a downturn in Hepburns career causing her to be branded box office poison from which she would eventually recover. A Turner Classic Movies article suggested that the films themes of sexual politics were ahead of its time and that the films reception has improved over the years. ........

Source: Wikipedia