Hilary Swank wears a Hamilton Khaki Field

Amelia (2009) is Mira Nair's biopic of Amelia Earhart, with Hilary Swank as the aviator, Richard Gere as her publisher husband George Putnam, and Ewan McGregor as Gene Vidal. It runs from her record flights to the 1937 attempt to circle the globe that she did not come back from.

The watch on Swank's wrist is a Hamilton Khaki Field Automatic, a 38mm steel field watch with a cream dial, an inner twenty-four-hour ring and a small date at three, cut to look like the military Hamiltons of the 1930s and 40s. Hamilton supplied it for a plain reason: the producers came to the brand because the real Earhart had worn a Hamilton, and the company sent back something period-correct, a leather strap and a thin, legible dial in the style of the aviator watches of her day.

The watch best tied to the real Earhart, though, is not a Hamilton but a Longines, a mono-pusher chronograph she wore on both of her Atlantic crossings and gave to H. Gordon Selfridge Jr. before her last flight, the caseback inscribed to record the gift. It survives, and sits today in the Ninety-Nines Museum of Women Pilots, the organization of women aviators that Earhart helped found and was the first to lead. Whatever she had with her on the flight that killed her was never recovered.