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The "theatrical line" and the "queer feeling," all part of the artist's palette. The first casualty is conventional Victorian femininity, slashed with scissors as Sylvia (Katharine Hepburn) fashions herself into Sylvester, off with the braided tresses and on with the slanted trilby. From Marseilles to London is a seesawing cruise with father the fugitive embezzler (Edmund Gwenn), Cary Grant as the amoral "gentleman adventurer" materializing out of the mist is not lost on Visconti (cf. Le Notti Bianche). Masquerades within masquerades—small-time grifting segues naturally into small-time showbiz, the "three bad eggs" tour the Cornish coast as "The Pink Pierrots," saltimbanques extraordinaire. The heroine's mimicry of masculinity gets kisses from the honking maid (Dennie Moore) and the posh vixen (Natalie Paley), plus bewildered attraction from the fatuous Bohemian (Brian Aherne), the sundress she dons to reveal herself to him turns out to be one more disguise. "We professional people can never resist a telling costume!" Sudden shifts are the norm in this moonstruck realm ("Au Clair de la Lune" is the melodic leitmotif), champagne euphoria gives way to a plunge off a cliff: "One sensation after another," the George Cukor approach with its frisky tempo and flavorful swaths of Shakespeare and Leoncavallo. No less an auteur, Hepburn keenly rides the continuous sense of play and confrontationally stretches her persona. (If her incandescent drag gazes back at Garbo, Grant's blithe and boisterous virility looks ahead to Sean Connery.) Gender lines like the performer's painted mustache, not so much a concealment of sexual identity as a reinvention. "Here, here, here. That's not the sort of entertainment we want, is it?" A mercurial pirouette of a film, beautifully unsettled, misunderstood by critics upon release but later understood by directors like Melville (Les Enfants Terribles) and Bergman (The Magician). In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |