Thursday Movie Picks: Female Athletes: Wandering through the Shelves hosts a weekly movie challenge in which you choose 3-5 movies based on that Thursday’s theme and explain why you chose those movies. Today’s theme is Female Athletes, so here are my choices!
DOTTIE HINSON (A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN)
Dottie was my favorite character in this movie, besides Marla (Hooch. HOOCH). Honestly, the entire cast of A League of Their Own could be shoved into this category. I absolutely adore this movie, and I remember going to see it when it was still in the theaters. It’s a sports movie, but it’s more about sisterhood. If I could change anything about this film, it would be the ending (Kit, you b*tch!). Geena Davis and Tom Hanks were SO good together, too. Funny that you can definitely feel sparks between Dottie and Jimmy, yet her heart lies with her husband… played by Bill Pullman (who loses the girl to Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle).
monica wright (love and basketball)
Love and Basketball does not get the love it deserves. It’s such a well done romantic dramedy and I love that the story revolves around the dreams of a female athlete, instead of solely around the dreams of the man and her place within them. Sanaa Lathan is amazing and her chemistry with Omar Epps is off the charts. I still quote this movie as often as I can.
kate moseley (the cutting edge)
Admittedly, it has been a very long time since I saw The Cutting Edge, but it has always been a favorite of mine. I remember in junior high, I bonded with someone over our love of this movie, and we would simply say, “Toe pick!” anytime we saw each other in the hall. Moira Kelly is fierce as Kate, a competitive, difficult ice skater who has to work with a retired hockey player as her partner if she wants a chance at Olympic gold. This is one of the ultimate enemies to lovers romances! I can’t wait to watch it again.
Brittani
July 8, 2021We match on Love & Basketball! I hope that’s popular today. I didn’t love A League of Their Own, so I didn’t go with it, even though it came to mind first. I haven’t seen your last pick.
Sara
July 8, 2021Love and Basketball is so underrated (I think I always say that when discussing the movie!).
Joel
July 8, 2021Oh I LOVE The Cutting Edge!! Yes it’s corny and transparently obvious how it will turn out but Moira Kelly and D. B. Sweeney have such a great chemistry and Terry O’Quinn is so good as her father that I stop and watch any time I run across it, and the skating! I can’t skate well but I love to watch those that can.
Love and Basketball has been on my to see list for a long time, I really should make it a point to catch it, but I really enjoyed A League of Their Own.
It does contain one of Tom Hanks’s best performances (that saying something since he’s usually first-rate) and Geena Davis carries the film securely on her shoulders. It would have been interesting to see how original choice Debra Winger’s interpretation differed from Geena’s but I don’t think it could have been improved. The supporting cast is strong as well, including Madonna who I usually don’t care for but she hunkered down and blended into the ensemble. The picture also works hard to evoke a sense of time and place which adds to its charm. I had thought it would be all over today but this is the first time I’m seeing it.
My expectation that League would be popular is one of the reasons I decided not to use the film, it was my first thought, but then I remembered an obscure film I saw not long ago that had the germ of the same idea. IF the filmmakers saw it (that’s a big if since it very obscure-I’d been searching for it for years to try and complete Rita Hayworth’s filmography) I can’t help but think it was at least in part their inspiration for the later film. My others are also early period pictures that fit the theme.
Girls Can Play (1937)-Ambitious cub reporter Jimmy Jones (Charles Quigley) covering the sports beat meets Ann Casey (Julie Bishop) player on an all-girl softball team sponsored by local drugstore owner Foy Harris (John Gallaudet). Jones thinking he smells a story about women in competitive sports pursues Ann, there’s a story alright but it’s not the one he thinks. Using the team as a mask of respectability Harris runs a bootleg operation from the back of his store. With the girls out on the pitch and Jones digging for dirt team catcher Sue Collins (Rita Hayworth) learns too much and pays the price. Lower case Columbia B has a shadow of the future A League of Their Own, but nothing is done with the idea. It does provide a glimpse of future star Hayworth, still a brunette, working her way up before the studio transformed her into one of the premiere love goddesses of the Golden Era.
Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951)-When teenager Florence Farley’s (Sally Forrest) skill as a tennis player begins to attract attention, her manipulative mother Milly (Claire Trevor-easily stealing the picture), pressures her to join the competitive women’s tennis circuit over the objections of Florence’s father Will (Kenneth Patterson). Florence’s fame and success grow and so do her mother’s ambition and chicanery. Look at the mid-century women’s sports world was both written (Martha Wilkerson) and directed (Ida Lupino) by a woman…the ONLY film directed by a woman in all 1951!
Pat and Mike (1952)-College athletic director Pat Pemberton (Katharine Hepburn) decides to enter some professional women’s golf matches to see how she’ll do. She excels until her domineering fiancé, Collier Weld (William Ching), turns up and distracts her. But before that happens sports manager Mike Conovan (Spencer Tracy) sees her talent and offers to train her, and she turns pro. After realizing that Pat stops trying when Collier is around, Mike works to keep them apart especially when he takes a shine to her himself. Written specifically for Hepburn by Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon because of the star’s athletic skill the film also features many of the top women athletes of the day including top golfers Betty Hicks, Helen Dettweiler and Babe Didrikson Zaharias.
Babe (1975)-Speaking of Zaharias, considered one of the greatest athletes of all time, this TV biopic follows her life (enacted by Susan Clark) from just before she won two gold medals in the 1932 track and field Olympics through her dabbling and excelling in baseball and basketball, her courtship and marriage to professional wrestler George Zaharias (football star Alex Karras), her decision to pursue golf, her ascension to the top of that game and finally being felled by cancer at age 45. Susan Clark (who won an Emmy for her performance) and Karras fell in love and married after the film remaining together until Karras’s death in 2012.
Sara
July 15, 2021I had no idea Debra Winger had been cast as Dottie! What happened there??
I’ve heard of Pat and Mike and Babe! But not the other two. I need to see Pat and Mike. I adore Katherine Hepburn.
Sonia
July 9, 2021I feel like I’m the only one who has not seen Love & Basketball 😅
Sara
July 15, 2021Oooh I hope you watch it! It’s so wonderful.
Wandering through the Shelves
July 16, 2021I haven’t seen any of them. The ones I want to watch are the bottom two. I have heard that Love and Basketball is great romantic comedy, and I’ve been looking for older ones that I’ve missed. The same goes for older teen dramas like The Cutting Edge which I’ve also missed.