Davis brings a mature grace to her role as Dottie while Petty gives Kit vulnerable spunk, a young adult on the brink of breaking out into adolescence all over again. Mostly, the film radiates with terrific performances. There’s even a touching epilogue in which the girls regroup for a reunion at Cooperstown nearly 50 years later.
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But in this case, so what? Yes, the film comes down to a climactic finale where the sibling rivalry between Dottie and Kit take center stage, but since when has a baseball movie ended with an 8-2 snoozer as the third act? From start to finish, A League of Their Own never tires the viewer and treats the material with just the right amount of weight to keep it from getting bogged down in heavy-handed moralistics. It takes a while, but Dugan manages to win his way back into the girls’ hearts, teaching them all he knows-including, most importantly, that there’s no crying in baseball.Ī League of Their Own is predictable and at times formulaic, and the level of ballplaying isn’t terribly convincing. But gradually he comes to see not only the talent in the girls but also admires their grit and resolve to play the game hard above all the silly, league-mandated short-skirt uniforms and etiquette classes. He barely acknowledges the girls at first, sleeping off hangovers in the corner of the dugout and spitting tobacco on their shoes. Dugan bristles at the idea but grudgingly accepts because he otherwise has nothing better to do than drink and stagger in the shadow of his former greatness. He plays Jimmy Dugan, a doppelganger for Jimmie Foxx who’s asked by Harvey to manage one of the girls’ teams. When Capadino says no thanks, Dottie and Kit threaten to head back home, and feminine solidarity is established. Among his travels he discovers solid prospects in a pair of Oregonians-Dottie, a headstrong, statuesque catcher (Geena Davis) and her kid sister/pitcher Kit (Lori Petty)-and in Colorado with a bona fide slugger who’s loaded with baseball skills but badly lacks the looks to attract male fans. The search begins for female talent from veteran scouts, one of them a wisecracking, cigar-chomping and unsympathetic Ernie Capadino, uproariously played by a scene-stealing Jon Lovitz. Walter Harvey, candy bar king and owner of the Chicago Cubs (emulating Phil Wrigley, actual gum king and Cubs owner of the time) tasks his nebbish “promotional wizard” (David Strathairn, previously seen in Eight Men Out) to start up a women’s baseball league to keep stateside morale up and transcend the ‘Rosie the Riveter’ tag placed upon women working in wartime factories. It’s World War II, and there’s a shortage of available, able-bodied male ballplayers in America.
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But under the steady hand of actress-turned-director Penny Marshall and a wacky script by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel-the duo who penned Hanks’ first movie splash, Splash- A League of Their Own easily takes the win as a delightful and well-paced look at the inaugural campaign of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in 1943. So all producers had to do was not screw things up by burdening the cast with a lousy script, as happened a few years earlier with another star-studded flick featuring Hanks, The Bonfire of the Vanities.
(The film was released in the same year as her controversial coffee table book Sex.) Rounding out the demographic range is the casting of Tom Hanks at the top of his comic game, and pop star Madonna at the peak of her notoriety. It appeals to women because it proves the ladies could play baseball, and it appeals to men because it shows the ladies playing baseball-whether they’re good at it may not be a primary concern to the guys. A League of Their Own is a Hollywood marketing exec’s dream, a perfect marriage of target audiences.
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