BELLES OF THE BALL
Classic and fun, A League of Their Own stands up
There’s a great scene in the 1992 film A League of Their Own that speaks directly to the new Netflix documentary A Secret Love. It’s the end of a big game and the Rockford Peaches, part of the All-american Girls Professional Baseball League, are getting ready to go back to their homes for the off-season.
When someone says it won’t be so bad, teammate Alice responds: “You don’t have to spend the next six months in Saskatchewan!”
A League of Their Own is a fictional story based on the very real women’s baseball league that was started to keep the game alive during the Second World War, when many of the male players were enlisted to fight. But as the new documentary A Secret Love reveals, Saskatchewan’s Terry Donahue made the trip to Chicago and played for several years with the Peoria Redwings. She was also in a same-sex relationship that lasted the rest of her life.
In A League of Their Own,
Alice is played by real-life Saskatonian Renée Coleman. The character isn’t lesbian — even in 1992 that would have been a stretch for a mainstream movie — but she’s clearly a nod to the Canadians who helped fill out the roster in that decade.
Alice is a minor part of the movie, which focuses on sisters Dottie (Geena Davis) and Kit (Lori Petty) who are recruited to play for the Rockford Peaches. The drama comes from the fact that Kit feels she’s living in Dottie’s shadow, being younger, not as strong a player, and less attractive. The strong lineup includes Rosie O’donnell at third base and Madonna in centre field.
The film holds up well even now as a stirring tale of sisterhood and camaraderie.
Sure, Tom Hanks as coach Jimmy Dugan gets the most quoted line of the film when he screams: “There’s no crying in baseball!” And Jon Lovitz basically steals every scene he’s in as the cigar-chomping scout Ernie Capadino.
While the movie may not give a voice to same-sex couples, its female director did fight against a romantic subplot between Dottie and Jimmy which would have made little sense given the era and the fact that Dottie is married.
The DVD release includes a deleted scene of a kiss between the two, with the distracted Dottie not noticing a pregnant teammate in harm’s way, resulting in an injury. This in turn leads to a scene where she is crying over her mistake. The final cut of the film has her crying over another teammate losing a husband in the war; her emotions seem overwrought until you realize what her original motivation was meant to be.
The movie is of course meant to be great fun, and watching it in these COVID-19 times will make any baseball fan miss the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd. (Movie fans will also miss the skill of director Penny Marshall, who died in 2018.)
But there are some nice touches, underplayed though they may be. An almost silent scene finds a ball getting away from one of the players after a game. It is picked up by a black woman in the stands, who then fires it expertly back. She doesn’t get a name or even a line of dialogue — just a meaningful look — but the reference is clearly to Toni Stone, Mamie “Peanut” Johnson and Connie Morgan, who were barred from the all-white girls’ league and actually wound up playing alongside the men in the Negro League.
A League of Their Own spawned a TV sitcom the year after its release, though it only lasted five episodes. But the idea of a televised reboot has persisted ever since, and a recent article in Deadline magazine suggests that its time has come, with a diverse cast including Chanté Adams, Roberta Colindrez and Kelly Mccormack, described in the article as “a shortstop from Moose Jaw, Canada.” No word on whether she or any of the other players are in a same-sex relationship, but don’t count it out.
A League of Their Own can be rented from Rogers on Demand, and rented or purchased through Youtube or Apple TV.