Wonderfully offbeat film!

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

My observations about this movie:This isn't pre-code. It's later-code. The code began 1930, and movie-making didn't pay much attention to its strictures until around 1934-1935 when the Hayes Code church ladies really tightened the screws. This is according to my recent film studies and theatrical critiquing coursework at university. Near-nudity Hollywood cinema was more prevalent before the early 1930s, yes, but in this movie (1933) there is a middle ground approach between total depravity and future movies where nonmarital pregnancies were pretended to not exist.Billie Burke was a Broadway stage star in the 19-teens, for impresario Charles Frohman. Later, she married Florenz Ziegfeld against Frohman's warnings (Frohman died 1915 in Lusitania disaster). Burke "retired" from show business. Ziegfeld lived high on the hog, and after many costly and fabulous theatrical productions was wiped out financially in the 1929 stock market crash. He died in 1932, a ruined man. Burke had tons of his debts to pay, so she went into movie acting. Her role in "Christopher Strong" (released 1933; maybe production began 1932) was dull, witless, dependent and boring -- at least it got a head start on paying Flo's bills. Burke's later roles included being airy and light in musicals, i.e. Glinda, the Good Witch of the North in "Wizard of Oz"/Judy Garland, and Mrs. Livingston Belney in 1949's "Barkleys of Broadway"/Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers. Burke was the daughter of an English circus clown named Billy Burke. Billie's real name was Mary William Ethelbert Appleton Burke.Colin Clive was Dr. Frankenstein in two Frankenstein movies. One would not think of him as a romantic person, but in Christopher Strong he overcomes his wooden shell and actually falls for bold and daring Katharine Hepburn's virginal career-oriented athletic persona. One look from him at her famous slinky form-fitting moth costume was just enough to make him fall head over heels away from his boring, clingy Billie Burke spouse.Hepburn's Lady Cynthia Darrington was broke. She must also have lost tons of money in the stock market crash and ensuing worldwide Great Depression. She lives in a crappy looking apartment, but has household help and is known as Your Ladyship. Indeed, she did not look like a "lady". She was very mannish, except for wearing that moth dress. The director was mannish, and I think Cynthia's riding outfits looked a lot like pictures I have seen of Dorothy Arzner. Cynthia did not have Arzner's mannish hairstyle. At any rate, think of Lady Darrington as a leftover from a Downton Abbey-type family who lost their riches during World War One. She must have pawned a lot of jewels to pay her maids' salaries, and slept with a lot of wealthy men (off-canvas, of course) to pay for those expensive airplanes and flying lessons. Hepburn wears a DRESS in this movie (moth costume), plus a gypsy SKIRT in her movie "The Little Minister (1934).I have also studied aviation, and have heard many times that Cynthia was designed as a study of the real life of Amelia Earhart who died 1937, four years after the release of this movie. Maybe Amelia was also pregnant by one of her many male financial contributors, and decided to "disappear". The ending of Christopher Strong perhaps "strongly" predicted the future. Amelia also looked masculine at times, but just like Cynthia she really liked men and enjoyed their comforts much more than the public was led to believe. Also in real life, both Earhart and Katharine Hepburn knew Howard Hughes. Hughes contributed majorly to Hepburn's movie career expenses. Howard, also a famous aviator and inventor, may also have paid a lot of Amelia's expenses. 10/10.

I'm not quite sure why the title of this film is not Lady Cynthia Darrington since the film rises and falls on the action of Hepburn's character and not on Colin Clive's title role of Christopher Strong.Clive is a most proper member of Parliament, probably a Tory, who through a treasure hunt, a la My Man Godfrey, he meets Hepburn who is a young titled woman who has an interest in aviation. In fact she's the British version of Amelia Earhart.Clive and wife Billie Burke have a daughter, Helen Chandler, who is something of a wild child. She's having an affair with the unhappily married Ralph Forbes. But before long it's Clive and Hepburn who get involved.Colin Clive gives us a perfect portrayal of a man going through midlife crisis when everything just seems to settle in a dull routine. He's so taken by Hepburn's vitality and independence that their affair has an inevitability about it.Dorothy Arzner one of the few women directors around at that point also gives us one of Kate's very first feminist icon roles. Her first film, A Bill of Divorcement, had Kate as a dutiful daughter who gives up her man to care for an insane father. Kate has some critical choices to make in Christopher Strong as well.What she does might not make sense to today's audience, but made perfectly good sense in post Victorian Great Britain. She and Clive make a wonderful pair of tragic lovers in a drama that while old fashioned still holds up.

This was one collaboration that drew attention. Lesbian film director Dorothy Arzner and film actress Katharine Hepburn. For God sakes, both women wore pants in town when it was seen as scandalous. Anyway, the legendary Kate plays a female aviator much like Amelia Earhart who falls in love with a married man known as Christopher Strong or Sir since he is titled. I loved the old black and white films especially since I think they provide so much more than today's films. Anyway, Kate's character and Strong have an affair. I love the scene where she wears that silly costume. Kate's role as the other woman could have been scandalous back then if it wasn't so obvious to the Strong family. Billie Burke better known as Glinda, the good witch in the Wizard of Oz, plays Lady Strong. I loved Katharine Hepburn and I think a lot of people did whether they were colleagues, friends, relatives, or whatever. I think she would become the other woman in the Spencer Tracy relationship in reality. Oh well, the film is worth watching if just for that costume.

Merry madcaps in London stage a treasure hunt, with one young woman inadvertently fixing up her married politician father with a strong, independent lady-flier who's never been in love. Intriguing early vehicle for Katharine Hepburn, playing an Amelia Earhart-like aviatrix who's been too self-involved to give herself over to any man. The director (Dorothy Arzner) and the screenwriter (Zoe Akins, who adapted Gilbert Frankau's book) were obviously assigned to this project to get the female point of view, but why are all the old clichés kept intact like frozen artifacts? Billie Burke plays the type of simpering, weepy wife who takes to her bed when thing go wrong, and Hepburn's final scene is another bummer. A curious artifact, but not a classic for Kate-watchers. ** from ****