"A League of Their Own"
                Reviewed by Linda Lopez McAlister
                  On "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM
                          July 4, 1992

   Penny Marshall's new film "A League of their Own," is a big,
beautiful 4th of July sparkler of a film that Women's Show
listners will definitely want to catch this weekend or sometime
this summer.  Marshall is unquestionably the most commercially
successful woman director in Hollywood having directed such films
as "Big" and "The Awakening," but this is the first time she has
turned her attention to material that deals with women and
women's issues; it's long overdue.  What she has given us is a
big, beautiful, highly professional and extremely likable film
about a big, beautiful, highly professional group of women
athletes.

   "A League of Their Own" is about the A.A.G.P.B.L.--the All
American Girls Professional Baseball League, which was started in
1943 by a few baseball owners worried about how they were going
to turn a profit during the war when so many of their players
were off in the service.  They send their scouts all over the
country to recruit the best women ballplayers they can find
(provided they are "lookers") and the sixty-four best are
assigned to the four original teams in the league.  Once signed
up the women are sent to "charm school" and given instructions on
ettiquette, hair, clothing, and makeup--all gently ridiculed in
the film, for the thing that really matters to these young women
is the once in a lifetime opportunity to play baseball in this
league with the best women players in the country.

   The film's plot is structured as a long flashback as a woman
in her late 60's surveys the ball field at the Baseball Hall of
Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. in 1988 and remembers back to 1943 and
the season she, Dottie Hinson (played by Geena Davis) and her
sister Kit Keller (played by Lori Petty) as members of the
Rockford Peaches.   In 1988 the surviving members of the league
did in fact meet in Cooperstown to see the league inducted into
the Baseball Hall of Fame, so the film is historically accurate
in that respect as it is in most, if not all, others.

   The Peaches are sixteen very diverse young women from all over
the U.S. (along with one Canadian), whose superb ballplaying,
dedication, and showwomanship, eventually overcome ridicule and
apathy from the spectators and become quite popular.  They even
succeed in gaining the respect of the alcoholic, down-and-out, but
formerly great, Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks) who is given the job of
managing the team, who, in the process regains his self-respect
as well.  The main dramatic tensions in the film come from the
conflict between Dottie and her kid-sister Kit whose chronic
anger at finding herself always in the shadow of her bigger,
better, prettier sister finally boils over near the end of the
season with Kit being traded to their arch rivals the Racine
Belles.
   Among the joys of this film for feminists is seeing young
women perform so brilliantly as athletes, and the depiction of
women as friends and colleagues.  Particularly striking is the
film's sensitivity to political issues. In one short, wordless,
and brilliant sequence the film shows and condemns the racism
that kept equally talented Black athletes from playing in the
league.  It strongly focuses on and condemns the widespread
practice of telling women during the war that they had to get out
and work in the public sphere only to force them out of their
jobs and back into the kitchen as soon as the war was over.

   Because of these strong feminist statements it's all the more
disappointing that Penny Marshall (who not only directed but was
executive producer) opts to create a fictionalized version of the
AAGPBL completely populated by heterosexual women even though
there were lesbians in the league's real life counterpart.  In
silencing this documented fact she misses a wonderful opportunity
to treat lesbianism in the nonsensationalized matter-of-fact way
that is so sorely missing from Hollywood films.  And in so doing
she exhibits the same sort of "bottom line on the balance sheet"
mentality and moral cowardice that her film condemns among the
baseball owners--unwilling to take the slightest risk that might
be unpopular and lower the profits.

   Despite this missed opportunity, the film has much to
recommend it; it's fun, funny, exciting and sad.  Kids will like
it, men seem to like it, and feminists will surely like
everything about it except the above-mentioned glaring omission.
The supporting cast, especially Madonna, Rosie O'Donnell, and the
rest of the Peaches are fine.  Don't leave before the final
credits roll and you see the 1988 Peaches playing once again.

   For the WMNF-Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on
Women and Film.