As so often with Hepburn, what seemed slightly outrageous or even grating at the time, has become something more interesting, more heroic. Much of the credit must go to the openly lesbian and prolific director Dorothy Arzner, who worked in both silent and sound films, and was a prophetic deconstructor of the “woman’s film.” There’s a keen awareness of the conflicts women faced in the workplace (Dance, Girl, Dance); in marriage (Craig’s Wife) and here where the tension between love and independence is at its starkest and most dramatic. A matter of life and death. A famous aviator and free spirit, Lady Cynthia Darrington lives, trains and breathes to fly. (Zoe Akins’s screenplay is adapted from a British novel by Gilbert Frankau.) She scorns the distraction of men, until an illicit love (in the form of the devotedly married Colin Clive) forces her into a bind. Wholly aware that the courage needed to risk death depends on a freedom from emotional entanglement, she has made him swear not to ask her not to fly. But then… love proves too much and he eventually does, thus sealing the end of that single-minded courage and inevitably her life. Hepburn often radiates a sense that the rules weren’t made for her, an air of privilege that could foster resentment. Here, however, her brazenness is pure gold – maybe because she was still so young. Or maybe because Arzner, a director who sometimes made women uncomfortable, felt and showed them at their most desirable. Here Hepburn can stride mannishly, charmingly through a room, and then appear moments later in a dazzlingly feminine, slightly outrageous silver moth costume (courtesy of Walter Plunkett), looking (as she often does in the cockpit) otherworldly, incandescent.

Molly Haskell