Flight for Freedom

This film is a rather creaky melodrama inspired by the Amelia Earhart story. Rosalind Russell plays Tonie Carter who has to put up with prejudice as she learns to fly but pretty soon is setting flight records.

Carter falls in love with ace pilot Randy Britton (Fred MacMurray) who is one of the people who is sexist to her at the beginning but they then drift apart. However she then plans to race around the world solo after she promises to marry her flight instructor Paul Turner (Herbert Marshall.)

As the film was made during the second world war, there are elements of propaganda weaved into the plot as Carter is agrees to undertake a secret mission on behalf of the navy where she would get lost in her flight and the rescue mission would allow reconnaissance pictures to betaken under the noses of the Japanese. This mission reunited her with Britton who declares to Carter what she means to him.

The film really did not start off well, rather plodding I thought but it does get better in the final segments and like the rather campy but sinister turn by the Japanese hotel manager, who seemed to have channelled the great Peter Lorre.

Poor Paul Turner he was so happy to have snagged Carter has his fiancé but it was never going to happen.