SOURCE: "Dorothy Arzner," in Cinema, No. 34, 1974, pp. 2-9.

In the following essay, Peary centers on Christopher Strong, praising Arzner's directorial and cinematic skills as he remarks on the film's characters and themes.

Dorothy Arzner's Christopher Strong is ripe for discovery, staking its most persuasive claim to recognition at that juncture of "auteur" aesthetics and progressive politics (sexual politics, that is) so rarely encountered in the American cinema. Furthermore, it is a significant Katharine Hepburn film, this, her second movie after A Bill of Divorcement; for it is at RKO in 1933, under the mature, even wise directorial tutelage of Ms. Arzner, that the youthful Hepburn first utilizes her noblest attributes—her independence, unconventionality, resilience, physical prowess, athletic skill—all in the services of the feminist philosophy.

As Lady Cynthia Darrington, world-champion aviatrix (a character reminiscent of Amelia Earhart), Hepburn demonstrates with the certitude of an Isadora Duncan that a...