A League of Their Own, Pt. 2: Mae Swings, Evelyn Cries, Jimmy Rants
Friday, June 30, 2017 at 2:00PM 
25th Anniversary Four-Part Mini Series Event
Previously in Part 1: "Dollies" who could also play ball were recruited to save America's Favorite Pastime while the men were at war. But these athletic women didn't realize that they'd still be met with such sexism despite the chance to show their gifts. The final piece of this movie's puzzle was the manager and the job was offered to Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks) and that's where we pick back up. How will the Rockford Peaches handle their new arrogant alcoholic boss?
Batter up...
Part 2 by Nathaniel R
33:40 "Ladies and Gentlemen welcome to the first game of the All American Girls Baseball League"... In this case via the establishing shot (Penny Marshall makes good use of those throughout) 'ladies & gentlemen' is a small plural; the stands are mostly empty.
34:39 It's the Jimmy's Marathon Pee scene! With Mae timing it. I vividly remember laughing out loud in the theater in 1992. I'm so embarrassed to share this next confession but what the hell, we only do these tag team revisits a couple of times a year...
Boy that was some good peein'!
After this movie I started timing myself while peeing. I am disappointed to say that I never could pee as long as Jimmy Dugan. Perhaps if I'd taken up heavy drinking?
The best thing about this long streaming scene (sorry), which doubles as Jimmy's introduction to his team is that, apart from Jimmy's closeups, Penny Marshall keeps the camera wide for almost all of it, making grand use of her finely tuned ensemble. None of them are slouches (though sadly a lot of them didn't seem to get bigger careers thereafter). They're always doing little bits in the background so it's fun to watch the movie repeatedly and pick up small details. The editors Adam and Bernardi and George Bowers insert only one two-shot (pictured above). Marshall doesn't even lean into the comedy of the team's new charm-school hairstyles. It's just a throwaway gag, for instance, that Marla's memorably flat hair is suddenly all glamour-girl curly.
bullshit youcanallkissmyass thatsright kissmybighairyass
36:35 Jimmy cruelly tears up a baseball card given him to sign and ignores the girls and Dottie steps forward as leader again. When Jimmy goes out to do his celebrity wave, he mutters profanities under his breath to the crowd. A bit of context: This was just before the media began to regularly anoint Tom Hanks 'The New Jimmy Stewart' and just before he won back to back Oscars but if you ask me this is his single best performance. He should have won Best Supporting Actor in 1992 and wasn't even nominated! Remarkably A League of Their Own received ZERO nominations. It was even snubbed for a Golden Globe for Best Comedy which is even worse than missing the ofttimes fussy Oscar slate given that they regularly reject "light" films. But this performance is effortlessly charismatic and crude and funny and juvenile and grown up and larger-than-life and sympathetic all at once. His absolute best I think, despite obvious highlights before (Big) and after (Cast Away, Captain Phillips).
37:09 The ladies aren't greeted as warmly. But 'All the Way' Mae (that'd be Madonna) blows them a kiss anyway, choosing to ignore their boos and pretend that the smattering of applause is loud and all for her.
One imagines that this is how Madonna has kept that massive career going for decades now, too, as she's always drawn as many jeers as cheers. For those of you who weren't alive yet or conscious of pop culture in the early 90s, Madonna was a controversial casting choice. Debra Winger, who was originally up for the lead role of Dottie, suddenly turned her nose up at the project when Madonna was chosen publicly calling it "stunt casting". Sure it was but stunt casting doesn't determine results! Madonna had the last laugh as the movie was a huge hit and proved to be her warmest, least forced, and most successful acting job (barring the previous year when she so brilliantly played herself in Truth or Dare).
37:56 Oh look it's a relative of that obnoxious tongue-wagging trucker in Thelma & Louise, the comically exaggerated neanderthal sexist. He's rolling up his pant legs and mocking the team. "Look at me I'm a girl. I might break a nail". Ellen Sue (Freddie Simpson) "slips" and hits him with a baseball. Hee.
39:00 Dottie wins her team the game via a Home Run with bases loaded. Naturally the sportscaster credits Jimmy with brilliant strategy even though he's slept through the game. It's both hilarious and infuriating in equal measure but Amazonian Geena Davis, ever cool (the world lost out when Hollywood stopped casting her in huge parts), smiles radiantly anyway as she rounds the bases. This movie didn't get enough credit at the time, or even now, for how effortlessly it skewers sexism while never feeling didactic. Penny Marshall was a young woman when Mary Poppins (1964) was released but she clearly learned one of its most famous lessons; she's generous with the spoons full of sugar.
40:09 Ira Lowenstein (dependably aces David Strathairn) reads Jimmy to filth for scratching his balls for an hour during the game. Jimmy freaks out with a misogynist rant. Sexism is so ugly, even when its All American Tom Hanks spewing it. There's a nice little insert shot of a wad of tobacco on Ira's shoe after Jimmy spits it out. Classy guy.
Lowenstein: If they paid you a little bit more Jimmy could you be a just a little more disgusting?
Dugan: I could certainly use the money!
40:25 rat-a-tat-tat. Sugar. Medicine. Sugar. Medicine. A League of Their Own isn't a fast-paced movie, often taking baseball's cue as a leisurely game, but Marshall's direction, the perfect ensemble, and the quippy screenplay by Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandel (who were Oscar nominated for another comedy sensation with Splash but unfortunately 1992 was super competitive in that category) keep it humming along nicely, never sticking to any one mood for too long.
41:00 "Betty Grable has nothing on these girls" another funny newsreel to keep us in period and economically tell us a month has passed in the baseball season and in the friendships of these girls.
43:42 Evelyn Gardner (Bitty Schram, wonderful) asks Jimmy if her son can hang with the team. "He's the sweetest little boy. Everyone's just going to love him" Cut to: total disaster. Even patriarchs in training are nightmares for these Peaches! Madonna chasing a little brat with a baseball bat -- that's what silver screen dreams are made of. Geena Davis's deadpan "I hope I have five just like him" kills me every time. Davis is such a confident actress that she doesn't have to lean hard into anything, comedy or drama, for it to totally land.
46:43 The girls sneak out too a roadhouse called Suds Bucket. I swear I didn't give myself Part 2 because it's the non-stop Madonna show. It was simply a matter of timing and the gods blessing me for my lifelong devotion to the Queen. Interesting trivia note about this particular scene. The stocky guy that Madonna is dancing with so athletically is a song & dance man named Eddie Mekka. He was a Tony nominee for Best Actor in a Musical in 1975 (for a show called "The Lieutenant") but was best known as series regular "Carmine, The Big Ragoo" on the 70s sitcom Laverne & Shirley that starred, you guessed it, Penny Marshall. The power of networking!
50:50 It's a mark of Geena Davis's gallons of star charisma that you don't even notice unless you're writing about the movie what a killjoy Dottie actually is. She's always bossing people around or playing mother hen. She stops all the fun to warn the girls they've got to leave before they're found out. But wait... where's Marla?
MARLA: I'm singin' to Nelson baby, aint I?
NELSON: You sure are.
51:27 After lots of comic dumping on Marla, here's a guy sweet on & swooning for her; there's someone for everyone!
52:12 The morning after. Mae is so scandalous the priest drops the Bible twice during her confession. It's like this role was written for Bad (Catholic) Girl Madonna but it wasn't. She was just perfect for it. Sometimes stunt casting is correct casting.
53:53 Another Laverne & Shirley cameo, this time it's "Squiggy" as emcee... microphone guy... sportscaster? Is that what you call them? I don't know sports.
54:30 An hour into the movie and Jimmy finally decides to manage the team. Which leads to a blissful moment of silent film ready physical comedy. It's so economical and funny and character and plot driven that the movie barely even needs the extra Jimmy vs Dottie smackdown "who's the manager of this team?" / "then act like it you big lush" that follows.
Is this out of focus?
No, that's how he looks.
55:45 A well judged quiet scene (which still doesn't forget to include jokes) for more Rockford Peaches bonding on the team's bus at night. Mae is teaching Shirley to road (with dirty books of course), Evelyn is composing a song, and Doris finds some self-worth tearing up the photo of her boyfriend back home who "treats me bad."
There's no crying... THERE'S NO CRYING IN BASEBALL!
58:12 CLASSIC. That is all. The scene is famous for a g-d reason. But the best part of the scene is that even though it endears you yet more to Tom Hanks as movie star, it also reminds you that even when Jimmy is "right" he's a prick, so it's character-specific, too. The best bit of the scene is, in a way, its coda. Jimmy immediately gets all crybaby himself, albeit without tears and in the form of tantrum grandstanding with the umpire. It's perfect that Doris applauds as Jimmy is kicked out of the game. The Peaches are beginning to work together but there's still much comic dynamism in their disharmony.
1:00:21 Ira Lowenstein reappears with bad emotional juju, sticking an accidental knife in the Dottie and Kit rivalry (which the movie has briefly forgotten about) and then informing the team that they might be shut down since people aren't coming to the games. Mae freaks out, not wanting to return to the demeaning dance hall job she once so obviously excelled at.
He implores the girls to give it everything they've got. (They do that already, ya well-meaning jerk!)
Will the girls save the team? Will Mae have to go back to taxi-dancing and let some slob sweat gin all over her? Will Kit ever get out from under Dottie's shadow? Find out in Part 3 tomorrow with Jazz T on loan from Awards Daily...
Reader Comments (13)
Madonna was truly fantastic casting, stunt or no. All of the casting was aces, actually. I think at the time I wasn't enough of a movie person to appreciate just how much Hanks was playing against type.
Love the still of Mae chasing Stillwell with the baseball bat - and yes, I too LOL at "I hope I have five just like him." No one did deadpan better than Davis.
Madonna is great in this film. She has her moments as an actress such as Desperately Seeking Susan, Dick Tracy, and my personal favorite in Who's That Girl?.
Just look at her. If charisma is all it took to be a great actress, she'd have Hepburn's record by now.
That coaching signals gif is so perfect. You're right about it being silent film-ready. I really miss Geena Davis.
This retrospective has made me warm to the film as I always liked it,your picking out all the parts and emphasizing their greatness,Madonna is so good here,a worthy GG supporting nominee.
Hanks is the one I don't warm to in the cast,He overplays terrible in some scenes sending Jimmy into caricature.
RE Geena did she step away from lead roles or did they dry up in 2000 like they did for Holly Hunter,Glenn Close etc.
I love this movie. One of my favorites. So rewatchable and quotable. Just seeing the gifs here brings a smile to my face. Every single one of these actors is firing on all cylinders. A true ensemble performance.
I think where Madonna excels, acting-wise, is in clever variations of her star persona (A League of Their Own, Desperately Seeking Susan, Dick Tracy, Evita, and, my God, Truth or Dare), not the trite, on-the-nose schlock (Body of Evidence, The Next Best Thing, etc.) that trips her up every time.
It may be hard to imagine now, but A League of Their Own was, at its time, somewhat of a comeback for Tom Hanks, who was coming a string of post-Big misfires (notably The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Burbs, Joe vs. the Volcano [which I personally love], Turner & Hooch). His superstar status wouldn't be cemented until the following year when Sleepless in Seattle, then Philadelphia, made him critical *and* box office gold. (Interestingly enough, shaky star Julia Roberts also had a "comeback" with The Pelican Brief that same year.)
Anywho, Geena Davis is the real anchor of this ship, God bless her. I'm so happy that she was able to capitalize on her Oscar win (like Whoopi Goldberg did soon after with Sister Act) with the one-two of Thelma & Louise and A League of Their Own. It's a shame that subsequent failures, but Cutthroat Island and The Long Kiss Goodnight (which is awesome!) in particular, cut her career as a leading lady brutally short. She deserves better.
GOD i love this movie. It's so fleet on its feet. That rousing score, while certainly not used sparingly, is yet another element that should have been in awards contention - it REEKS of Americana, specifically baseball.
And yes, Madonna is so great in this, isn't she? I know the part wasn't written for her but, that line of Rosie's that comes a bit later ("...you think there are men in this country who ain't seen your bosoms?") is yet another example of how perfect she is for this part.
I, too, wish Hollywood had done better by Geena Davis, but after the one-two punch of massive flops Cutthroat Island and The Long Kiss Goodnight, it's not surprising (not that she was the reason those films did poorly AT ALL).
rosie o'donnell is getting enough credit; she and madonna are a great double act but it's her punchlines that really puts the zing into their relationship ["she was one of the dancers; i was the bouncer"]
Madonna never excels at acting. She is just okay when she is barely in the movie. I would have liked to have seen the version of this with Debra Winger.
ESPNW has posted an oral history of the movie, featuring the producer, writers, and some of the cast:
http://www.espn.com/espnw/feature/19437746/an-oral-history-league-their-own-25th-anniversary?addata=espn:frontpage
Some good inside info. The writers talk about the peeing scene...
Ganz: Tom is a master.
Mandel: We knew we were in good hands from the first day with his urination scene.
Ganz: When he came in the locker room and peed for a minute?
Mandel: Oh, he peed for weeks.
These recaps have been a joy, reminding me of what a fantastic piece of pop filmmaking this is.
While it's a terrible shame (at least in Hollywood terms) that ALOTO received zero Oscar love, do you think it would fare better in today's Oscar environment? Reading these recaps reminds how much the film resembles Hidden Figures, both charming period pieces about women entering a traditionally 'male space', primarily comedic, at least in the first two acts, but with a strong dramatic spine and in both cases anchored by a glorious ensemble. I'd like to think in an expanded list the Academy would have thrown it some love