Henrietta Hay's Column

Most of my movie watching is done from an easy chair in my friend's house, eating her popcorn and drinking her diet pop. But occasionally I get impatient and spring for a real live movie in a real live theater. That's the way it was this summer with "A League of Her Own." No way was I going to wait for that one to hit the video stores.

This movie had a huge buildup. For over a year there have been stories about the casting and the filming. Then there were reams of newsprint telling us whether we were going to like it or not. Seldom have I seen such wildly contrasting reviews. Some said it is wonderful, a feminist movie, the blockbuster of the summer. Some said the film is "good," which is damning with faint praise. Some said it was a lightweight "women's film" that good macho males would disdain. One reviewer even said it was a woman bashing film.

So I went to find out. As I walked out of the theater into the hot, bright sunshine, my mind was still back in my C. U. days belting out a home run. It took me quite a while to return to the present and realize that this is 1992 and I'm not twenty any more. I think the negative reviews of that movie were written by people who weren't even born yet when those women played baseball. Usually I go to movies to be entertained, but the great ones are the ones that move me emotionally. This one did.

In 1943 we were beginning to run low on male athletes. They were off in Germany or Italy or Africa or the South Pacific fighting a war. Professional baseball was especially hard hit and the farm teams practically disappeared. That year the baseball bigwigs thought up a very novel idea. Why not have a girls league? (In those days all females were known as "girls.") They could have a little bit of "girl type" baseball and a lot of sex appeal. The All American Girls Professional Baseball League was formed. It started with four teams and expanded to 16 before it wasted away in 1954. The pay range was $65 to $125 per week plus expenses.

Penny Marshall has produced a wonderful movie out of the experiences of those women. They came off the farms and out of the cities to play ball. They were used and manipulated. They were laughed at and insulted. They were treated like the second-class citizens, which they were then. But they were strong and they were willing to take all the abuse, to wear those silly uniforms and do the cheesecake poses because they wanted to play ball. And much the surprise of the good ole boys, they turned out to be superb athletes who really could play baseball. What could have been a sexual freak show turned out to be real athletes playing a real game. Could those women ever play baseball! And they loved it.

Although I never saw an All American Girls League game and the only baseball I played was in college, the women in the movie took me right out on the field with them. When one of them made a clean hit I had that wonderful solid feeling in my shoulders. When somebody caught a fly ball I could feel it in my hand. And when Kit crashed into Dottie in the final scene I was in real physical pain remembering the day two of us ran full speed for a high fly and forgot the cardinal rule, which is to watch where you are going. As I lay on the grass and watched the stars going around, the ball lay dead beside me even as it did in the film. I'm sure she didn't drop it on purpose. It brought back to me the days when I was young and strong and coordinated, which is a very nice thing for a movie to do.

But while I was caught up in emotion and running around hitting imaginary baseballs, a friend who is today about the age those women were then, saw it from a later perspective. She pointed out that while this is very much a feminist film, it is a nineties version. The star catcher, the best player the league ever had, chose to leave at the end of the first year and return to Oregon with her husband, safely back from the war. She had proved to herself that she was the best and she could let go. In the seventies the pressure would have been on her to stay with the League. In the nineties we say, "It's your choice."

Practically every actress in Hollywood wanted to be in this film. They were all out learning to swing a bat. The star, Geena Davis, said of the original players, "They're amazing, wonderful women. They deserve to have their story told." And in the end we got to watch some of the real players from that league, now in their sixties and seventies, playing the game they still love. They had a League of Their Own.