“After the tremendous success of Hepburn's fourth film, Cukor's Little Women, RKO was not exactly willing to lose its hottest property to Jesse Lasky (who wanted her for a biopic of ballerina Anna Pavlova) or to Broadway. But Hepburn was itching to perform ‘The Lake' on Broadway, and agreed to make Spitfire with director John Cromwell to gain her release from the studio. It produced one of the strangest, most fascinating oddities of her career.
“She plays Trigger, a tomboyish, illiterate Ozark Mountain girl who believes she is a faith-healer and is driven from the community through fear of her strange powers. Cromwell chose to shoot extensively on location in the San Jacinto mountains near the Mexican border, a factor which intensifies the strangeness of Hepburn's urban, nasal twang in a completely rural setting. Her fiery, intense performance split the critics (but) the advance publicity said it all: ‘Completely and daringly different from anything she has ever done.'” --Richard Kwietniowski