Free Bird: ‘Christopher Strong’ (1933)

The curiously-titled Christopher Strong is really all about Lady Cynthia Darrington, an aviator and aristocrat with a hankering for danger, a cavalier disregard for convention and quirky fashion sense. Katharine Hepburn plays Cynthia. Of course I had to see it.

The film opens in London at a scavenger hunt for the well-heeled. Female contestants are charged with finding an attractive man who’s been married over five years and remained faithful, while the men have to track down a beautiful girl over 20 who’s never had an affair. (A similar hunt in My Man Godfrey, another film about the idle rich released three years later, manages to be condescending in a different way: contestants have to find a Forgotten Man.) Monica (Helen Chandler), one of the Bright Young Things in attendance, knows just the man: her father, Sir Christopher Strong (Colin Clive). Christopher is a devoted husband and decent, old-fashioned chap; Clive plays him as if he’s made almost entirely out of tweed.

That same night, Monica’s friend Harry (Ralph Forbes) has a motorcycle accident and is rescued by Cynthia, who he is delighted to learn is over 20 and has never been in love. He ropes her into returning to the party with him and there she meets Christopher. Cynthia is a daredevil; Christopher leads a tranquil existence. Nevertheless, they strike up a friendship which rapidly develops into love.

Directed by Dorothy Arzner and adapted from Gilbert Frankau’s novel by Zoë Akins, Christopher Strong is part-grand tragedy, part-satire. Christopher believes, however unfashionably, that devotion to one’s wife and country are the noblest ideals in life. He and Lady Strong (Billie Burke) are shocked by Monica’s impropriety: not only is she a party girl, but Harry, her favourite dance partner, is married. Yet Christopher’s principles prove little defence against his heart. If he and Cynthia were more like the rest of their set, they would have a casual fling, the flame would burn out and they would both be satisfied. But if they had been more ordinary, they would never have found each other extraordinary.

It’s difficult to grasp what sparks Cynthia’s attraction to Christopher, but there’s no question what he sees in her. A comet soaring upwards, Cynthia routinely ignores the limitations others would impose on her. When she decides to enter a dangerous round the world race, one of her mechanics asks why she would even consider it: she’s only a girl. “Well, it interests me and it’s about the only thing that does at the minute,” she says, laughing. (Arzner incorporated real aviation footage, adding to the film’s authenticity.) Her cheerful lack of conformity extends to her wardrobe, which includes multiple pairs of trousers (before they entered the mainstream for women) and this outfit, for a costume ball:

In many ways, she and Christopher are opposites. “I’m a very reckless person, Chris, and you’re a very cautious one,” she warns him, the night he confesses his love. She knows loving him means compromise: not just give and take, but sacrificing her ideals. Late in the film, the pair spends a night together and the camera frames Cynthia’s outstretched hand as she admires the bracelet on her wrist, a gift from Christopher. She never cared for jewellery before, she tells him, “but now I’m shackled”. The bird has clipped her wings.

Christopher Strong was only Katharine Hepburn’s second film and it belongs to her completely. Cynthia is intelligent, confident, unconventional, qualities which became essential to Hepburn’s screen persona and which, by all accounts, she shared herself. Colin Clive had enough madness in him to make his Doctor Frankenstein indelible, but Christopher, stuffy and strait-laced, gives him nothing to do. And Billie Burke has even less to work with as the long-suffering Lady Strong.

Christopher Strong celebrates passion as a grand, ennobling ideal, while simultaneously punishing its central lovers for believing just that. It also argues that an independent woman who gives up her freedom, even for love, submits herself to a form of death. It’s a great showcase for Hepburn, but besides that, I’m not entirely sure why it exists.