Director Penny Marshall knocked it out of the park with this terrifically warm, heartfelt and effortlessly entertaining baseball picture, scripted by the veteran screenwriting duo Lowell Ganz and Marc “Babaloo” Mandel, in the spirit of old-fashioned films such as The Pride of the Yankees with Gary Cooper, or Knute Rockne, All American with Ronald “The Gipper” Reagan.
It was inspired by the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, founded in the second world war because the men were all away fighting. It is outstandingly performed and Madonna, in a small role, is perfectly directed and cast in a way she was never to be again in the movies. David Strathairn plays the general manager, Mr Lowenstein, and the director Garry Marshall, brother of Penny, has a cameo as the league’s owner, Walter Harvey.
Geena Davis, meanwhile, is excellent as Dottie Hinson, a farm worker whose husband is away in uniform: she loves to play baseball in an amateur league and so does her endlessly competitive kid sister Kit, played by Lori Petty. Ernie Capadino (Jon Lovitz) is the fledgling league’s obnoxious scout and he is keen to sign Dottie, and not Kit, but Dottie won’t join on her own. The pair are introduced to their team, the Peaches, and to their manager, the notorious drunk and has-been former player Jimmy Dugan – who, of course, gradually comes to love his players and finds redemption in managing them.
Jimmy is played by Tom Hanks in that way he has of nullifying the supposedly bad parts of his character’s personality and somehow making them nice too. Hanks has to spit, urinate in front of the girls, behave objectionably and be hungover a lot. You could never believe Hanks would do any of these things, but the force of his movie-star personality convinces you that it doesn’t matter.
The film is chiefly known for the legendary scene in which Joe yells at right-fielder Evelyn Gardner (Bitty Schram) who then bursts into tears and contemptuous Jimmy announces: “There’s no crying in baseball!” – just to make sure everyone sees her humiliation. In the hands of any other actor, that would be a startling, even shocking scene of dysfunctional abuse. But sprinkled with Hanks stardust, it becomes a piece of hokey homespun wisdom about baseball, albeit brusquely expressed. Later, Jimmy has to give Evelyn another telling-off, but you can see he has supposedly learned his lesson, suppressing his bad temper with a grin. But there was never any real bad temper.
The movie powers along with some glorious corn-fed montages about life on the road, going from town to town, match to match, on the bus. And the men, however rough-hewn, are perfect gentlemen. A new version of A League of Their Own might want to acknowledge more explicitly the fact that no African American women were hired, and maybe fictionalise the parallel existence of one or two left out (Davis nods respectfully here at one woman of colour who throws the ball to her with expert accuracy and force.) However, it’s a great piece of Hollywood confectionery, and you might well find yourself choking up a little at the end.
