AE Movies

Released:

FLIGHT FOR FREEDOM

(1943) Theatrical film, 102 minutes, RKO, B&W.  A thinly fictionalized retelling of AE's life and disappearance starring Fred MacMurrary and Rosalind Russell.  The plot, with the exception of the romance, may be very close to the truth.  AE's husband, G.P. Putnam, helped write the script along with Earhart,'s ham radio operator Walter McMenamy.

AMELIA EARHART

(1976) Network movie starring Susan Clark, 150 minutes, Universal, color.   A so-so biopic of Amelia Earhart that stops short of touching her disappearance. Fair casting, but not a great film.  Photography is soft, luminous, almost mystical (done by the same cinematographer who did the TV series "City of Angels").  Susan Clark was great in her part, as was John Forsythe,  the best casting yet as G.P. Putnam

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AMELIA EARHART: THE FINAL FLIGHT

(1994) 95 minutes, color.  Another network film starring Diane Keaton, Bruce Dern, and Rutger Hauer.  Hugely inaccurate historically and the poorest AE film to date.  Keaton is good, but too corpulent for AE, Dern is very good but physically wrong for the part, and Hauer does the best he can with a horrible part and costume.

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Funding / Preproduction:

Allied Artists

LOST FLIGHT OF AMELIA EARHART

AMELIA

(2009) Theatrical film, 111 minutes, Fox Searchlight, color. Entertaining and visually beautiful biopic.  Hillary Swank is great casting as AE and turns in a memorable performance.  Richard Gere is fair as G.P. Putnam and Ewan McGregor is  forgettable in a film overly dominated by a romance that probably never existed.  The film is fraught with historical errors and misses a lot of potential by omitting so much.

Click here for my full review.