Word: earhart
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...1990s saw a brief resurgence: among the highlights was the 1998 fete honoring John Glenn for becoming the oldest person to go into space, at age 77. Coming 36 years after his first one, it put him in an élite club of multiple-parade honorees, including Amelia Earhart, Dwight Eisenhower and Charles de Gaulle. But there have been only two parades this decade - one for the Yankees fresh off their World Series victory in 2000, and one for the Giants after they won the Superbowl last year. Until...
...does a man ride a horse?" Earhart responds when George Putnam (Richard Gere) - her future manager, publisher and husband - asks why she wants to fly. When he first proposes marriage, she demurs, telling him, "I want to be free, George, to be a vagabond of the air." To a bleary-eyed pilot who questions her decision to take to the skies in dicey weather, she says, "I'm as serious as you are hungover." Earhart may well have said all these things, but you wish the filmmakers had been bold enough to let their heroine sound like a real person...
Ghosts of Aviation And what potential for humanizing material there is in Earhart's unconventional love life. On her wedding day, she gave Putnam a letter that included this line, reprinted in East to the Dawn: "I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me, nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly." In the movie, she writes with the groom snoozing behind her, then reads it out loud. Languishing against the pillows, hand over eyes, Putnam mutters that such brutal words are tolerable only coming from her. Gere struggles to sell the melodrama...
Then there's her friendship and apparent long-standing affair with Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), a West Point flying instructor who became head of the aeronautics branch of the Department of Commerce during the Roosevelt Administration, thanks largely to Earhart's advocacy with Eleanor Roosevelt (a jolly Cherry Jones). Gore Vidal, a child at the time, confirmed to Butler much of the relationship, sharing details like Earhart's habit of wearing Gene's underwear while aloft (helpful with that midair funnel). With tidbits like this, who needs flashbacks to ticker-tape parades? But both romances are bloodless. Even when Earhart...
Sensibly, the screenwriters and Nair aren't coy about Earhart's likely fate. There are no absurd conspiracy theories involving the Japanese or suggestions of her making safe landing on some deserted island - just communication blunders and furrowed brows (a Swank specialty), and then she and the plane are gone, vanished in the typical way of small planes running out of fuel over a vast ocean. It's not even particularly sad until Nair rolls the documentary footage of the real Earhart. There, grainy and distant, is the "ghost of aviation," as Joni Mitchell called her in the 1976 song...