CHRISTOPHER STRONG

One of the first performances by the immense Katharine Hepburn, four Oscar winners, one of Hollywood’s immortal legends, a model of the independent and rebellious woman. From a successful novel by Gilbert Frankau, director Dorothy Arzner (at the time one of the rare female authors in Hollywood) made a melodrama that shows the first signs of that female protagonism of which Hepburn became an incomparable symbol over the years. In the role of a reckless aviatrix, wrapped in a silver pilot’s suit and attracted like a moth by the light of independence, Hepburn first had an affair with a married English politician and then with an Italian man. When she discovers that she is pregnant by the former, who has no intention of breaking the rules of respectability and morality for her, she commits a spectacular suicide by jumping from his twin-engine plane.