By Lee Wallace
During World War II, as a means of maintaining public interest in baseball, US businesses sponsored a league of all-female teams. Like Rosie the Riveter, they were a temporary measure, just until the boys came home.
The story of such a team has an irresistible commercial hook — a feminist, baseball, nostalgic buddy-pic that can be played for laffs 'n' tears, and when that film features both an emergent pop icon and the pop icon, well, as with The Addams Family, you would be curious no matter how disappointing the word of mouth.
The resultant schlock-buster, A League of Their Own is overwrought, predictable, manipulative and intermittently offensive. Of course it arrives just in time for the holiday season, complete with fat jokes and a cruelly caricatured "ugly girl" subplot, all the while pretending a patina of congenially progressive sexual politics.
However, as far as contrived, commercial product goes, A League of Their Own has a certain tawdry appeal. The film has an undeniable sense of showmanship, and in its own meretricious, ingratiating, artless way it emits an amiable hum and gets by on an extroverted charm. It is entertaining, despite one's better judgment.
The focus is on one team, the Rockford Peaches, from initial recruitment to Grand Final. In the early scenes a baseball talent scout snaps up Dottie (Geena Davis) and, less enthusiastically, her kid sister Kit (Lori Petty), and spirits them away from their Oregon milkmaid existence to play major league baseball. Dottie and Kit's sibling rivalry becomes the central narrative device.
At the subsequent try-outs, the film's plot clunks into third gear as the supporting cast is introduced. Megan Cavanagh is given the dispiriting task of playing an ugly duckling called Maria whose sole function is as a walking punch line for a series of sophomorically sexist jokes. She is written out early in a clumsy, but merciful, gesture.
Tom Hanks plays the inevitable drunken, grouchy has-been who finds redemption after reluctantly agreeing to coach the Peaches. (Hanks manages to receive top billing, after Geena Davis, although his role is secondary). Madonna and Rosie O'Donnell show up as two tough-talking brassy pals, and so on. A League of Their Own is the kind of film that thinks it's engineering suspense with the tease of whether Geena Davis and Madonna will make it through to the final selection.
The exuberance of the cast is what carries the film. There's an unforced camaraderie among the actors. Their good humour is contagious, and while Madonna may not exactly be stretching by playing >all the way Mae", her cocky vitality gives her scenes a snap.
It is Geena Davis, though, who propels this otherwise artificial epic by managing to ground her character in some sort of empathetic reality. After The Accidental Tourist, I thought Davis would be typecast in quirky supporting roles as the gawky, ingenuous girlfriend. Her alpine frame and slight overbite are potential career straitjackets in Hollywood.
Thelma and Louise changed those perceptions completely. It was a breakthrough, liberating role, and the good will emanating from Thelma has carried over to her latest performance. Her sheer physicality imbues Dottie with a graceful, quiet fortitude. Davis even makes something real and affecting out of the tired dramatic device which has Dottie torn between loyalty to her absent soldier husband and an emerging fealty to her sporting talent.
It's a shame that the script writers, Babaloo Mandel and Lowell Ganz (responsible for most of Ron Howard's scripts), and the director, Penny Marshall, couldn't find the inspiration to do more than the usual production-line hack work. The film is basically a series of set pieces; Marshall obviously has no sense of how to bind an organic whole. It doesn't build, it just chugs along, with every joke and narrative development telegraphed miles in advance. Marshall (late of Laverne and Shirley) may have shot the film in wide screen panavision, but she's framed everything with an eye for the small screen.