A League of Their Own.

Great thrillers, like The Thirty-Nine Steps, contain comedy, pathos, and romance as well as hairbreadth escapes, but merely good thrillers aren't so various. Their only aim is to excite and any element that won't contribute to the excitement is excluded. Great thrillers work us over in many, sometimes contradictory, ways. Good thrillers are efficient and monomaniacal.

Patriot Games is a good thriller. Its director, Phillip Noyce, is utterly ruthless. He is like a ship's captain who will tolerate neither excess cargo nor stowaways. Everyone and everything must contribute to the trivial and irresistible goal.

Are the members of ex-CIA agent Jack Ryan's family given tiny humanizing traits? Yes, but that's not real characterization at work, making us care about these people as people; it's only trickery designed to animate these mannequins just enough to make us queasy when an I.R.A. splinter group, enraged by Ryan's intervention in a terrorist kidnapping, begins menacing them.

Does that shot of a house seen against the Irish skyline appear startlingly beautiful, perhaps too much so for an action film? Don't worry, the beauty is soon infused with menace as I.R.A. gunmen enter the shot to kill the house's occupant, and the visual splendor becomes an ironic comment on the ugly violence to follow.

Does a lap-dissolve from Jack Ryan's troubled countenance to the hate-filled face of his mortal enemy, terrorist Sean Miller, suggest some spiritual parity, some moral equivalence between CIA man and terrorist? Of course not! Noyce isn't trying to turn Tom Clancy into John Le Carre. There is an emotional parity, of course: Miller is trying to avenge his brother's death at the hands of Ryan; Ryan is trying to protect his wife and daughter from Miller. Both are family men whose love drives them to violence and both are using the high-tech machinery of their one-time masters--the I.R.A. and the CIA---for their personal ends. (Hence the movie' s ironic title.) But shared emotions and techniques don't keep Ryan from being the hero of this movie or Miller from being its villain. The lap-dissolve merely drives home the antagonism between good and evil without suggesting that the moral borderline is being blurrfled.

One much-remarked-upon scene, Ryan watching on a monitor the aerial view of a terrorist camp's destruction, has reminded critics of the video game appearance of the televised Desert Storm operation. And it is chilling--or should be, at any rate--to see human lives represented by just so many electronic circles bleeped into nonexistence as the unseen, unheard bombs fail. But the morality of thrillers like Patriot Games is controlled by your visceral reactions. The chill produced by this sequence doesn't begin to equal the concern we feel for Ryan's daughter when she is almost snuffed by terrorists in a highway attack. She is a little girl screaming in close-up; the bombed terrorists are electric lights. In thrillers, even more than in most other types of movies, surface rules. Philip Noyce swims very strongly in very shallow waters.

But dispensing with moral complexity doesn't necessarily lead to cinematic

crudity. Noyce is deft, not blunt. He scares but he doesn't pound us. He makes only two missteps and I'm grateful for one of them: Richard Harris, as an I.R.A. fundraiser, is allowed to give a performance of such glinting suggestiveness and sinister charm that many viewers may momentarily wish that the film were about him rather than Ryan. This is unfair to Harrison Ford who has his marching orders chin up and glower!--and follows them. But soon Harris is out of the picture and it's back to the puppets.

The other misstep is less gratifying. The entire last action sequence--a speedboat duel-is so outlandish that the viewer's suspension of disbelief loses its suspension. But, until then, the movie had me in its grip. In fact the penultimate scene--a battle in a darkened house--got me so keyed up that I pulled the armrest off my seat and was obliged to sneak out during the closing credits before the ushers could discover my vandalism. After all, why should I pay for the damage? It's all Phillip Noyce's fault.

League of Their Own, about women's baseball promoted as a novelty in 1943 while the male players were away at war, is skillfully shot. It's fast, varied, agreeably raunchy, beautifully lit by Miroslav Ondricek, and it features a performance of uncanny equilibrium by Geena Davis. Sometimes it's even moving, as when the coach played by Tom Hanks, a broken-down, alcoholic ex-star, mutters, "How did I ever get so useless so fast?" But since A League is supposed to be a baseball comedy with some insight into what has and hasn't been possible for women in American society, the movie disappointed me for two reasons.

First, baseball itself is scanted by the moviemakers. We see a swing, a catch, a slide (Madonna again and again diving toward home head first--was the same shot recycled?) followed by news headlines telling us how the team is doing. This isn't baseball, it's montage. For the rest, we are treated to behind-the-scenes squabbles, romances with townees, troubles with the crocked coach, and various hijinks. We might as well be watching a comedy about traveling show girls bossed by a rummy road manager. Second, this movie written by men, Babaloo Mandel and Lowell Gantz, and directed by a woman, Penny Marshall, is ambivalent in its attitude toward women. Not creatively, thought-provokingly ambivalent but confusingly, offputtingly so. Of course we are shown how the league owner tries to exploit the femaleness of his players for sex appeal. And of course parallels are drawn between the players and their "Rosey the Riveter" counterparts on the work force, free to work while the men are soldiering, doomed to domesticity when the males return. But although this movie keeps flaunting its feminist credentials, it keeps burning them, too. Repeatedly, homely women are'mocked in this movie. And it's not merely that we are shown insensitive men mocking them; we are encouraged to laugh at them. When Tom Hanks, sodden with booze, lurches out of sleep, kisses his team's ugly chaperone, then starts back aghast at not having bussed the beauty of his dreams, the moment is staged in such a way that the audience will laugh only at the chaperone. Marshall is a very skillful director so the neanderthal laughs do come, but why should they all be at the expense of an elderly woman when the Hanks character, unshaven and reeking, is at that moment even more physically repulsive? I am not trying to be more feminist-than-thou. Making fun of angular spinsters is in line with a comedy tradition that goes back to Plautus, if not Aristophanes. But A League of Their Own is so obviously reaching for a Capraesque sweetness that such moments as that kiss undermine the moviemakers' more generous impulses. And the cheap shots tie in with the lack of love for baseball evinced by the movie. When a particularly homely player finally fulfills herself, is it through her playing, her super-power-hitting? No. It's by getting drunk and wild enough at a roadhouse to attract the attention of a local boy who will later marry her.

At the end of the movie Geena Davis, retiring from the game, informs a friend that it's not the sport she'11 miss most of all, but the company of her fellow players. That, I suspect, is how Penny Marshall wants the audience to feel. She doesn't want us to remember her characters as baseball players but simply as lovable women who happen to be playing baseball. But the movie isn't expansive enough for such an appraisal. The plot runs on rails; will the rival sisters played by Geena Davis and Lori Petty face off in the climactic game? Of course. Will the one with the inferiority complex overcome her inhibitions and reach for victory? What do you think? And all the other characters, with the possible exception of Geena Davis' s, aren't multidimensional. Hanks is defined by his drunkenness, Madonna by her sluttishness, another by her solicitude for her brat of a son, another by physical ugliness, Davis's sister by her inferiority complex, and so on.

It's really neither sport nor affection that fuels A League of Their Own. It's schtick.