Katharine Hepburn's first starring role, as world-champion aviatrix Cynthia Darrington (a character modeled in part on Amelia Earhart), was directed by Dorothy Arzner, then the only woman film director in Hollywood. The film's feminist statement goes beyond the question of the fulfilled professional woman to that of female heroics-the desire for thrills. As critic Gerard Peary wrote in 1933, "Hepburn demonstrates with the certitude of an Isadora Duncan that a woman's true happiness comes through intense, front-seat participation in an exciting profession...Conversely, the same happiness can be squandered away, the talented woman's life wasted, if she should misdirect this energy toward some egocentric man, such as Christopher Strong's titular hero, actually non-hero (played by Colin Clive)." Pauline Kael, looking back on the film, wrote, "(Strong) was drawn to her because, unlike his conventionally feminine wife (Billie Burke), she had audacity and independence...But as soon as they went to bed together, he insisted, late on the very first night, that she not fly in the match she was entered in...I don't know of any other scene (in movies of the thirties) that was so immediately recognizable to women of a certain kind as their truth...It is the intelligent woman's primal post-coital scene, and it's on film." Cynthia Darrington's solution to the problem is found in an aerial climax of startling ambiguity, one which may reflect the "problem" represented by a proto-feminist triad-Arzner, writer Zoe Akins and Katharine Hepburn-coming in for a landing in Hollywood.