Christopher Strong (1933)
Directed by Dorothy Arzner

Film Review

After her impressive debut in George Cukor's A Bill of Divorcement (1932), Katharine Hepburn is firing on all cylinders in her first leading role as a driven woman aviator in this engaging melodrama, adapted from a novel by Gilbert Frankau.  Hepburn is feminist fodder par excellence and is more than capable of playing a strong-willed femme fatale who genuinely looks as if she prefers a cramped cockpit to a cosy bridal suite.  Colin Clive, fine actor though he is, appears uncomfortable playing opposite such an overpowering female presence and Billie Burke, an actress you love to hate, doesn't even get a look in.  This is Kath's film from start to finish, and when she suddenly turns up dressed as a moth (in a tight-fitting silver lamé costume, complete with antennae) you have to pinch yourself to make sure you're not dreaming.

Not surprisingly, given its obvious feminist overtones and preponderance of female characters, the ironically titled Christopher Strong was directed by a woman, in fact the only woman director working in Hollywood at the time: Dorothy Arzner.  Lady Cynthia (the part played so memorably by Hepburn, with and without antennae) is typical of the tough, independently minded women that cropped up in Arzner's films, and it is no great stretch of the imagination to see that she might, like Arzner herself, be a lesbian (her passion for aviation being a convenient smokescreen to conceal her lack of interest in men).  In any event, Hepburn is effortlessly more butch than her co-star Colin Clive (by at least three orders of magnitude) and still manages to be the most ravishing woman on the planet.

Uninhibited by the censorship constraints that came in with the Production Code a short time after the film was made, Arzner is able to portray Lady Cynthia as a sympathetic character without the need to cast judgement on her for committing the cardinal sin of adultery.  (Once the Code had come in, films had to make it clear that adulteresses were punished for their 'sins' and shown to be immoral).  Arzner shows her artistry in a few inspired scenes, notably the expressionistic flashback denoument and the bedroom sequence in which the camera is fixed on Lady Cynthia's hand and lower arm as the two lovers exchange sweet words, discretely out of camera shot.

As far as 1930s melodramas go, Christopher Strong is a reasonably satisfying example of its kind, although  it is let down on two fronts: its far from perfect casting (Hepburn deserved a more charismatic co-star than Colin Clive - Ronald Colman would have been a much better choice) and its overly mechanical plot.  Even before the film manages to drag itself to its midpoint, it is clear how it is all going to end, and there are few things more irksome than watching a film pan out exactly as you imagined it would.  The irony is that had the Production Code been in force the screenwriters would have been obliged to change the ending to something slightly less nihilistic, and that might have been to the film's advantage.  Whatever failings the film has are, however, more than made up for by Katharine Hepburn's deliriously weird close encounter with lepidoptery - so say nothing of her flying leathers...

Film Synopsis

For a bet, socialite Monica Strong brings together her father, the English Member of Parliament Christopher Strong, and committed aviatrix Lady Cynthia Darrington.  So devoted is she to her flying exploits that Lady Cynthia has never fallen in love - until the moment she meets Mr Strong.  As they embark on an illicit love affair, Lady Cynthia agrees to give up her dangerous hobby.  Strong's wife, Lady Elaine, soon discovers her husband's infidelity but is unable to bring herself to confront him with this knowledge.  Instead, she turns her disapproving eye towards her daughter, insisting that she will not attend her marriage to a divorced man.  When, several months later, Lady Cynthia receives the news that Monica is expecting a child, she decides she must give up Strong, even though she is herself pregnant...