Ramona

This week we will be watching Ramona, the 1936 version of the classic novel by Helen Hunt Jackson. The film is hardly Citizen Kane: Don Ameche is wooden and Loretta Young is not much better. But with all its flaws it gives a nice visual sense of what it was like to live on a California rancho. It is hard to students today to imagine what it was like to live in a wide-open California, with no freeways or shopping malls or suburban sprawl. There was still a little of that California left when the film was shot, and just seeing these landscapes is well worth the 84 minutes of the film.

There were a number of silent versions of Ramona and probably the best of them was the 1928 version starring Delores del Rio. The pictures in the YouTube video are of her, not of Loretta Young. The song was written for her to sing during promotions for the movie. It became a huge hit. It makes me a little melancholy when I hear it. One of my sisters was born with dark black hair, and my father called her his "Ramona" when she was a baby. I can still remember him singing this song to her when rocking her to sleep. We lost my dad to lung cancer in 1999.

Home Studies: (1) Do the Open Court packet. (2) Do "Multiply," Math, pages 221-223. Copy problems and show all work.