The “string of very dull movies” that almost killed Katharine Hepburn’s career
In 1938, Katharine Hepburn‘s career was in danger of tumbling into oblivion. In fact, she’d hit such a rough patch that the Independent Theatre Owners of America printed an advertisement labelling her and ten other Hollywood stars as “box office poison”.
It was a far cry from only four years earlier, when Hepburn won her first Academy Award for her hugely charismatic performance as aspiring actor Eva Lovelace in Morning Glory. In 1936, she added her second Oscar nomination for Alice Adams, but trouble was already brewing for the star, who was beginning to suffer too many failures surrounding her hits.
In truth, these two Academy-approved roles were the exceptions to the rule for Hepburn in the ‘30s. Outside Morning Glory and Alice Adams, she starred in a succession of forgettable movies that tanked at the box office. To her horror, she also performed in a theatrical production of The Lake so disastrously received that she paid the producer, Jed Harris, most of her life savings to shut it down, rather than subject her to ten weeks of diminishing audiences and vitriolic reviews.
In this period, Hepburn scrambled for parts that could recapture her former glory, but made four duds between ‘35 and ‘37 that she was particularly disappointed in. “During this period, my career had taken a real nosedive,” she admitted in her biography, Me: Stories of My Life. “It was then that the ‘box-office poison’ label began to appear…I had made a string of very dull movies: Break of Hearts, Sylvia Scarlett, A Woman Rebels, Quality Street.”
Sadly, there isn’t much to recommend these films, with Sylvia Scarlett being the only one worthy of any true discussion. That picture, which was resoundingly rejected by audiences and critics at the time, cast Hepburn as a con artist who dresses as a man to evade the police and adopts the new identity of Sylvester. RKO Pictures’ makeup artist Mel Berns did an incredible job transforming Hepburn for the movie, and the film also cast her opposite Cary Grant for the first time, the debonair matinee idol who would become arguably her most famous screen partner.
Unfortunately, Sylvia Scarlett’s playful treatment of gender norms, while being decades ahead of its time, was too shocking for audiences and critics in ‘35, who weren’t anywhere near ready for such a progressive approach. In the film, Sylvia kisses a woman while dressed as ‘Sylvester’, and becomes so accustomed to playing a man that she stays in drag even when there is no need to. It’s also made crystal clear that men and women are attracted to both Sylvia and Sylvester, and this likely created a sense of sexual panic in the scant few audience members who actually paid to see the film.
Ultimately, Sylvia Scarlett’s forward-thinking nature couldn’t keep it from being lumped into the category of “dull” failures by its own star, and she admitted that she actually felt sympathy for the independent cinema owners, such as New York’s Harry Brandt, who published the ad claiming she was “poison.” They needed pictures that people wanted to see in order to make money, after all, and Hepburn wasn’t delivering the goods.
However, she also theorised there may have been a bit of bad blood behind the owners’ ire because many of them were supposedly forced by the studios to accept certain pictures, such as those starring Hepburn, Joan Crawford, and Marlene Dietrich, to be given access to the movies they truly wanted to display.
Whatever the case, Hepburn’s career was circling the drain in ‘38, and even the release of Bringing Up Baby in ‘39 – later recognised as a screwball classic – couldn’t dig her out of the hole she was in. It was only with the release of The Philadelphia Story in ‘40 that Hepburn made a triumphant comeback. When that film broke box office records at Radio City Music Hall on its way to being the biggest hit of the year, Brandt reportedly announced, “Come on back, Katie. All is forgiven!”
