“There’s no crying baseball!” The iconic quote from the 1992 film “A League of Their Own” is easily one of the most recognizable lines in the history of cinema.
While the movie is a solid comedy – directed by Penny Marshall and quintessential of early ’90s style and talent, it also touches on such dour topics as women’s rights, family values, and the perils of war. Its loosely based on the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League which was established in 1943, but the fictional representation leads to what I believe to be odd if not unnecessary plot choices that ultimately hamstring the overall product.
The movie is set in 1943, with the early stages of the all-girls baseball league created to fill the void of major league baseball players like Joe DiMaggio going off to fight the Nazis (try picturing a star athlete of today doing the same). We see actual footage of events of the era, which offers intrigue and awe as we get a peek of what life was like several generations ago. The National Pastime is always of utmost importance, so the new league is established as a way of filling the void for the men overseas fighting. The plot focuses on one such team, the Rockford Peaches.
“A League of Their Own” highlights some obvious issues of the time period, like gender bias as we see the standard and probably slightly exaggerated men in the stands catcalling and jeering the female players, and even an infomercial that chastised the women athletes as not being proper ladies.
The star player on the Peaches is Dottie Hinson (Geena Davis) and with her we see a skilled athlete whose husband is off to war. Dottie works on a family operated farm and struggles with her hyper-competitive little sister Kit (Lori Petty). I think the relationship between the sisters’ is the best aspect of the movie. The banter is real and the rapport natural. We get the impression that Dottie and Kit love each other, but there’s no hiding the obvious sibling rivalry between the pair.
Tom Hanks plays Jimmy Dugan, the manager of the Peaches, who was once a great baseball star himself but an addiction to the bottle ended his career prematurely. While Hanks is well known in the role – and specifically delivering the aforementioned line about crying, the character is poorly developed and spread quite thin.
We know he’s an alcoholic, we know he doesn’t think women should play baseball, and we know he has feelings for Dottie. But all these issues are thinly touched upon to a level that begs to know why they were even included at all since the story is fictional? The Dugan character grows in a manner of an instant, becoming the sober and respected manager we would all expect, and a caring and loving figure to the girls on his team.
Ancillary characters are great such as Jon Lovitz as a perfectly sleazy talent scout in a role only he could pull off so well, and the great David Strathairn as the General Manager of the league. Pop star Madonna is surprisingly funny in the role of Peaches Center Fielder Mae “All the way” Mordabito, and even Rosie O’Donnell is okay at first as Third Baseman Doris Murphy, but as one would expect, O’Donnell’s presence quickly grows irritating.
I think “A League of Their Own” would have been better served as either or; either its a fictional comedy or its a serious biographical piece. By blending both aspects, there are some laughs for sure, but also a lot of depressing parts, and far too many characters introduced that lead to each being poorly underdeveloped.
That said, its still a good movie to watch, and one of the better baseball movies out there.
