Kit Kittredge & Miss Audrey

Yes today was the official start of the American Girl movie "Kit Kittredge". My sister, Missy, little Miss Audrey and I went over to The Greens to catch the first viewing. I was sort of expecting to see gobs of little girls with their American Girl dolls... but the theatre wasn't really that crowded.



The setting of the movie is Cincinnati, Ohio in 1934. Kit Kittredge, an aspiring news reporter has a happy childhood, but that happiness is interrupted when her father loses his car dealership and heads off to Chicago to find work. Kit and her Mom are left to manage on their own, growing vegetables, taking in boarders and even selling eggs.

Then a crime spree sweeps Cincinnati, all signs point to the local “hobo jungle”. Kit, who always has her antennae out for a good news story, convinces her new friends to take her to see the hobo camp for herself and writes an article that creates a sympathetic portrait of the camp’s residents.

But when Kit’s mother and their boarders become the latest victims in a string of
robberies, Kit’s loyalties are tested. Will, a boy (hobo) who is working for her Mom doing odd jobs, is accused of the crimes and, with all of their savings gone, the Kittredges face losing their house to foreclosure.

Determined to recover the stolen money and believing Will is innocent, Kit recruits her friends to help her track down the real culprit. Together they uncover a plot that goes far beyond Cincinnati!

The movie does bring up how "hobos" were treated by an affluent society and how ignorance creates fear in people.

And the ending of the movie is very touching. So touching in fact, that Missy was crying buckets of tears and when I handed her a kleenix she blew her nose with so much force, the sound of all that drainage hitting the tissue, I was worried that the lady sitting in front of us might have been hit.

It is a good family movie. Girls will probably like it more than boys. Grandmothers in the age timeframe of 65 to 80 will probably really enjoy it as it will bring back memories of their childhood. The only thing I found distracting was Julia Ormond playing the wife to Chris O'Donnell. She looked more like his Mother... way much older than he.