Product: A League of Their Own (Widescreen Edition) [VHS] (1992)
Rating: 4.0
Very entertaining
This film drew attention to a largely forgotten footnote in the history of American baseball, the All American Girls Professional Baseball League, a league of female players who began when the major league men went off to fight WWII and who managed to endure until 1954. That is perhaps its greatest achievement. As a film, it is a pretty formulaic story of reliable stock characters bonding and enduring adversity with a big showdown at the World Series at the end. Penny Marshall's direction is efficient, the cast is very good, and the script by Babaloo Mandel and Lowell Ganz provides some good laughs, resulting in an entertaining if conventional Hollywood film. I was touched more than I expected when the players reunite after many years at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown at the end. Rather than putting aging make-up on the actresses, the filmmakers found some remarkably similar doubles to portray the characters as older women.