Katharine Hepburn’s first starring movie role is a rather minor one in Christopher Strong.
The Production: 3/5
Katharine Hepburn’s first name-above-the-title starring role was in Dorothy Arzner’s Christopher Strong, a 1933 marital infidelity melodrama that plays rather stiffly in the modern day. Hepburn herself in later years didn’t find it a very interesting picture, and the stuffy morality that ebbs and flows between obeisance and hypocrisy is rather wearing even in its brief 78 minutes of runtime. But in charting Katharine Hepburn’s learning curve into becoming one of the screen’s most fascinating faces and voices, it’s of some little interest.
Long-married Sir Christopher Strong (Colin Clive) and famous aviatrix Lady Cynthia Darrington (Katharine Hepburn) meet at a scavenger hunt as the two winning catches: he having never cheated on his wife and she having never been involved in a love affair. From that beginning, their paths seem to continually cross as Cynthia is helping Strong’s daughter Monica (Helen Chandler) feel her way through an unhappy love affair with the married Harry Rawlinson (Ralph Forbes) after Mrs. Elaine Strong (Billie Burke) has removed herself from the entire matter as unseemly and unsightly. Slowly, Christopher and Cynthia fall in love against their better judgment after Cynthia sets an around-the-world flight record, realizing that her risk-taking could end her life at a moment’s notice and neither wants to have any regrets about not exploring their attraction before it’s too late.
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Zoe Akins’ script was adapted from the novel by Gilbert Frankau, but there seem to be some chunks of the story missing in the transition from page to soundstage. We never meet the cheating Harry’s wife as the spoiled Monica plays the “other woman” in their triangle relationship (we’re meant to side with Monica in the triangle, but she’s rather brittle and self-pitying throughout) though we certainly see the Cynthia/Christopher/Elaine triangle in more expansive bits and pieces. Of course, as the wronged wife and mother, Elaine suffers nobly keeping her angst to herself and crying pitifully alone in her massive separate bedroom, but she makes it hard to sympathize with her when she doesn’t put up much of a fight to keep her marriage whole. Unplanned pregnancies become part of the story, too, as one would expect, but director Dorothy Arzner’s most creative idea comes near the end when we see a highlights montage of the Cynthia/Christopher affair as Cynthia resumes her aviation career attempting to set a new altitude record, the one record she has yet to achieve. Though the ending comes as no surprise, there are some lyrical and terrifying moments in the finale that we all knew were certain to happen.
The role of a daring aviatrix fits the coltish Katharine Hepburn like a glove looking as dapper in jodhpurs or a leather flying jacket and boots as she does in a startlingly skin-tight and glistening moth costume or some frilly and floral-encrusted gowns designed by Howard Greer and Walter Plunkett. She has already mastered the glistening eyes and smiling through tears motif that would serve her well for decades to come, but she lacks a bit of authority that she would soon achieve in pictures like Little Women and Alice Adams. Colin Clive is all stiff-upper-lip aristocrat as the faithless title character, and Billie Burke as the wronged wife is likewise effective as she learns over time to temper her criticisms with some acceptance of the inevitable. Helen Chandler and Ralph Forbes make an attractive couple though we don’t get to know as much about the latter as we might like. The unbilled Donald Stuart plays Cynthia’s navigator/mechanic Joseph Drummond very appealingly.
Video: 4.5/5
3D Rating: NA
The film’s 1.37:1 theatrical aspect ratio is faithfully rendered in this 1080p transfer using the AVC codec. The image has been cleaned up nicely, but the grayscale doesn’t render the black levels with much depth so that the image doesn’t quite pop as some other 1930s films have done on Blu-ray. The movie has been divided into 19 chapters.
Audio: 4.5/5
The DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono sound mix sometimes betrays its age. Though dialogue has been well-recorded and is presented quite clearly, there are several instances of muffled flutter that haven’t been able to be digitally removed. Max Steiner’s background music and the various sound effects add luster to the film’s soundtrack as presented here.
Special Features: 1.5/5
Two-Reel Shorts (HD): two 1933 shorts are offered: Plane Nuts (19:42) with Ted Healy and the Stooges and Tomalio (21:37) with Fatty Arbuckle.
Buddy’s Beer Garden (7:11, HD): 1933 black and white Looney Tunes animated short.
Overall: 3/5
Dorothy Arzner’s Christopher Strong is a melodrama of minor interest and is probably only for the fans of the director or her rising star leading lady Katharine Hepburn. The Warner Archive Blu-ray release does present the film in its best-ever home video package.
Christopher Strong [Blu-ray]
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Matt has been reviewing films and television professionally since 1974 and has been a member of Home Theater Forum’s reviewing staff since 2007, his reviews now numbering close to three thousand. During those years, he has also been a junior and senior high school English teacher earning numerous entries into Who’s Who Among America’s Educators and spent many years treading the community theater boards as an actor in everything from Agatha Christie mysteries to Stephen Sondheim musicals.
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