Players are needed, and sarcastic scout Capadino (Jon Lovitz) is on the job, rounding up women who have both looks and baseball talent. Even though there are eight teams in the league, all the women we meet end up on the same team, the Rockford Peaches.
Aside from the backbenchers, the Peaches feature all-star Dottie (Geena Davis), Dottie's jealous sister Kit (Lori Petty), bad girl Mae (Madonna), tomboy Doris (Rosie O'Donnell), and homely Marla (Megan Cavanagh). Former MLB star Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks) is their manager, despite his sexist contempt for women ballplayers.
The league is struggling financially, until league czar Lowenstein (David Straithairn) convinces the players to flaunt their sexuality to Life magazine photographers. From then on, the small-town stadiums are miraculously full. The good feeling is disturbed by Kit's frustration with Geena getting more attention than her. She is traded to a rival team. Of course, both teams make it to the World Series, and Dottie, who has been lately playing house with her hobbled hubbie Bob (Bill Pullman), shows up to play deciding game seven.
How others will see it. A League of Their Own was a box office smash, surpassing 100M in U.S. box office alone. It was critically praised, as it drew a slew of festival nods, including a Best Actress nomination at the Golden Globes for Geena Davis. The film remained well-respected twenty years later, as confirmed by its addition to the 2012 addition to the National Film Registry.
Today at imdb.com, the movie has a high 87K user ratings and a fairly high user rating of 7.2 out of 10. Women over 45 give it the highest rating, 7.7. U.S. voters grade it significantly higher than do those outside the U.S., 7.5 versus 6.9.
Tom Hanks' complaint that "there's no crying in baseball" is the most famous quote from the movie, and has seeped into popular culture, at least to a small extent. The user reviews indicate that most viewers believe it is an entertaining comedy, and the highlight of Penny Marshall's career as a director, excluding Big, which benefited from even more of Tom Hanks.
How I felt about it. It is obvious from my lowly grade of 36 that I do not care for this movie. Certainly, it could have been much better. How?
First thing to go is the framing device of a 50-year (or so) reunion of the 1943 Rockford Peaches. Some find it charming to watch women in their seventies playing baseball, and hamming it up as if they were the Harlem Globetrotters. But, at least in this case, I do not. Why not leave the women in their youthful glory, instead of pretending that they all ended up happily ever after, and made it to the fifty-year reunion.
Why would Stillwell have even been invited? Why do all the photos on the walls of the hall of fame seem to feature the 1943 Peaches, as if there weren't seven other teams and eleven other seasons?
Then there's the predictability. Who else saw it coming that drunken and disinterested Jimmy Dugan would suddenly snap out of it and become as big a competitor as he was when he was the home run king? Who else knew that the sibling rivalry between the sisters would culminate in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series?
Admittedly, it is less predictable that cavewoman Marla would win an adoring man by singing pop standards backed by a jazz small group. But happy endings, such as the saving of the league at the last moment, are standard procedure for feel-good comedies, whether they make sense or not. The same goes with unlikely dramatics, such as the Hinton sisters boarding the train to the tryouts at the very last moment, and unlikely events, such as the women's team babysitting problem child Stillwell (Justin Scheller, in his sole acting credit) during games. Madonna can exult in her bad girl character in 1992, but in 1943 the culture was less tolerant, and we can't pretend different. And whose idea was it to cast Rosie O'Donnell as a baseball player?
The point of the movie is that women can do anything that a man can do, and just as well, whether it is 1943 or 1992. We grant that this is generally true. But we also don't care, which is why the women's baseball league eventually folded, and why most sports fans can't name five present players in the WNBA.
Tom Hanks is as charming as ever, Geena Davis is as cute as ever, and Madonna is as sassy as ever. But it doesn't work, because neither the characters nor the situations are credible.