Amelia
Short description
Amelia Earhart, already famous as the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, sets out in 1937 to circle the globe. When her plane vanishes over the Pacific during that attempt, the world is left with a mystery that is never resolved. The film follows her rise as an aviator in a field dominated by men, and the relationships that shaped her life: her marriage to publisher and promoter George Putnam, and her connection with pilot Gene Vidal. Fred Noonan, her navigator on the final flight, also appears.
Mira Nair directed, working from a screenplay by Ronald Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan. The film came after The Namesake and New York, I Love You in Nair's filmography, and it is the eighth of the eleven features she has directed. Hilary Swank plays Earhart, with Richard Gere as Putnam, Ewan McGregor as Vidal and Christopher Eccleston as Noonan. The production cost about 40 million dollars and took in roughly 20 million worldwide, so it did not recover its budget.
Audiences were lukewarm: on IMDb the film sits at 5.8 from around 14,000 votes, and on TMDB at 5.7 from roughly 269. Critics were harsher still, with a critics' rating of 4.7 from 159 reviews.
What's left behind the scenes
- The 1927 Packard 7 Passenger car shown in the film belonged to Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974), who was gifted it by the Mayor of New York after his first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to Paris on May 20 and 21, 1927.
- The film depicts the 1929 air race between Santa Monica and Cleveland, in which Amelia Earhart (1897-1937) finished third. The fact is that Earhart and her friend Ruth Nichols participated in the race, but Nichols' plane crashed during takeoff before the final leg. Instead of taking off herself, Earhart first ran to her friend's plane, made sure she wasn’t seriously injured, and only then took off. She finished third precisely because of the takeoff delay. The same episode is shown in the 1939 biographical drama "Women in the wind" by John Farrow (1904-1963).
- As Amelia approaches Karachi, it is 1935, and the screen displays "Karachi, Pakistan." The state of Pakistan was formed after independence from India only in 1947, so in 1935 Karachi was still in India.
- A Petty Officer Third Class salutes an incoming Petty Officer Second Class. Enlisted and non-commissioned officers only saluted officers, not each other. Furthermore, salutes are not given indoors on the Navy and Coast Guard, and a hand is never brought to a bare head.
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