Kit Kittredge: An
American Girl, with Stanley Tucci,
Joan Cusack and Julia Ormond, produced by Julia Roberts (New Line Home Video,
2008, 101 minutes, $7.39, rated G)
You love
the American Girl book series, you have your favorite girl and era, maybe even
a doll or two. Now watch the movie, Kit
Kittredge: An American Girl.
Hobo signs,
hobo jungle, hobo stew and a hobo friend or two – yes, back in those years, a
girl could go exploring on her own – downtown to ask for a job at the newspaper
or even to the local hobo camp.
Yes, of
course, our American girl has a dog: Grace. The given-away-to-anyone Bassett is
adorable. How Grace came to belong to Kit’s family is quite a story in itself,
not to be forgotten because it serves as the background to the times, the Great
Depression of the 1930s.
Kit
Kittredge, budding reporter at 10 years old in Cincinnati, Ohio, is also
adorable and wise beyond her years – lucky, too. This plucky girl manages to
solve a robbery, unmask a criminal and get her story published in the local
town paper bringing in needed money for her family.
The year
was 1934. Mothers wore gloves and little girls wore dresses and men wore hats.
Kittredge Motors is taken over (foreclosed) by the bank so the family grows
vegetables, sells eggs, takes in borders: a librarian who can drive the
bookmobile but can’t seem to find the brakes, a magician, a dance teacher. (Is
one of these the criminal?)
And fathers
go off to Chicago and New York City, looking for work. Kit’s father writes to
our budding reporter, who writes back often. Will her father find a job? Will
he return to Ohio?
What will
happen in the treehouse club and who is the boy who turns out to be a girl?
Watch the first
American Girl theatrical movie and find out. Even Baltimore has a role to play!
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