A League of Their Own (1992)
A League of Their Own takes place during the height of World War II. The draft had claimed all the good baseball players and now the team owners are trying to figure out if they need to shut down the league. Eventually, they decide to start a women’s league until the war ends so they send out scouts to enlist women to the teams. A scout finds Dottie Hinson and her younger sister Kit Keller in Oregon and decides that Dottie would be perfect because of her skills and because she has “dolly” good looks and that’s exactly what they are looking for. After some convincing, Dottie and Kit are convinced to try out. Kit is ecstatic while Dottie is really only trying out for her sister. Both girls tryout and make the same team, the Rockford Peaches. We see that the girls are required to go to beauty school classes and that they’re required to wear uniforms with skirts or else they need to leave the team. The team manager is Jimmy Dugan and we see that he is less than enthused to be leading a team of girls and often says that they aren’t ballplayers. The women’s league struggles with the fans until Dottie does some things that bring more attention and she shortly becomes the star of the league. The league continues on to be successful and we see the fans rally behind all the women ballplayers.
I liked this movie because it was a fictional account of something that really did happen. It was cool to see the things that these women went through just to do what they loved. Unlike the men's baseball league, the women’s baseball league wasn’t chosen solely based on their skills, they were chosen based on their looks too. At the beginning of the movie we see that one of the big reasons Dottie was chosen by the scout was because she was “kind of a Dolly, that’s what we’re looking for” and “it's just that we want girls who are easy on the eyes.” Many people also didn’t look at girls as ballplayers and no one really thought the women’s league would succeed. In the movie we see a guy in the crowd making fun of the girls when he yells “I hope I don’t break a nail.” In order to promote the women’s league and to bring fans to the stand they put out ads showing each of the women on the team doing feminine things and showing off their good looks. We also see signs in the stadium saying, “catch a foul, get a kiss” in order to create more excitement. The women who kept baseball going while the men were at war went through a lot of struggles just to play a sport that they loved. At the end of the movie, we see that they didn’t regret it one bit because of their love for the game and all of the friendships that they made.
AB
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