The Babe Ruth Story

As has been noted already here, this film is worse than mediocre; it is ludicrous at best. Why the film was as badly scripted as it was is anybody's guess at this late date. Scenes which should have come across as poignant come across as corny. The Miller Huggins death scene is especially bad, where "Babe" is talking to him thinking he is still alive, and the nurse pulls the sheet over the face because he is already dead. The jump from his youth in the orphanage to major league baseball is disconcerting. William Bendix wasn't a great actor in the sense of a Bogart or Tracy. But, he wasn't that inept either. The production was rushed to completion before Ruth's death and one can only wonder what he must have thought of it, given the chain of contrivances. This film could have been honest and inspiring, instead it is fraudulent and vapid.

This is often pointed to cynically by sportswriters and fans as the ultimate ridiculously sugarcoated sports-hero film. Who's to argue? If you know Babe Ruth and what he was like, you almost have to laugh at some of the stuff in here. That's not to say Ruth was a bad man, because he wasn't. He was extremely likable guy whom his teammates all loved, he was fantastic with kids and very, very generous man. But he also had a lot of faults, too, some of which got him in big trouble with his managers and league officials. His health was a problem at times, thanks, in part to his opulent lifestyle. He was a glutton and an adulterer and life wasn't fun for him as he got unfairly passed over to be a manager, something he desperately sought. Very few if any of these negative qualities are the in the film - just the good 'ole boy - the kind William Bendix played on his TV show, "The Life Of Riley."

Also unrealistic - and typical of sports movies in the "classic era" - is Bendix trying to throw and hit a baseball. Thank goodness modern-day movies don't have actors like this who are clueless on how to play the actual sport they are portraying.

Yet, as sweet and unrealistic as this film can be, it's a lot better than doing the reverse, which is what Hollywood did in 1992. Too bad you usually get two extremes when it comes biographies made in Hollywood. In the "classic era" films, our heroes could do no wrong. Since the '60s, our heroes are shown to be blemished more than anything else. Where is the middle ground.

The solution, obviously, is to be "fair and balanced," but don't look for that in most biographies made into movies, especially dealing with sports heroes.

Schmaltzy biopic of the legendary slugger, released just a few weeks before he died. It's no "Pride of the Yankees," that's for sure. I've reviewed a lot of biographical pictures from Hollywood's Golden Age and I tend to be very forgiving of the liberties taken with the facts to tell a compelling story in a limited amount of time. But, brother, this one really pushes it. This is so cheesy and over-the-top with its attempts at sanctifying Babe Ruth. He cures two sick kids in this thing, for crying out loud. One of them was paralyzed!

William Bendix was probably as close to ideal casting for Ruth as you were going to get but the script really just plays him up as a big saintly teddy bear instead of treating him like a real person. There are also a number of clichéd characters hanging around like the fatherly priest, the chorus girl with a heart of gold, and the unflaggingly loyal friend. I should also point out that very little of the movie actually deals with the game of baseball. There's only a handful of scenes that show the game being played and most of them are just Bendix poorly imitating Ruth's pitching and hitting. It's really a pretty lazy part of the film. I won't rate it as low as many others are, and I certainly wouldn't include it on my "worst ever" list unless we're being super narrow on what that includes. It's perfectly watchable and even enjoyable at times. But it's so unbelievably corny and tired I doubt even the biggest fan of classic Hollywood or baseball will walk away loving it.

When I was a lad I remember taking the book this film was based on out of the Brooklyn Public Library. Babe Ruth's ghost written memoirs by Bob Considine were considered so innocuous that it could be found in the children's section of the library.

The Babe had only been gone from us for about seven years when I read the book and saw the film. The film is as how he would like to have been remembered. Of course it was hardly the character he was. Left out of this film is the hedonism that ran rampant in his persona, the drinking, the womanizing, the brawling.

What gets me about this film is that William Bendix was a huge baseball fan, in fact he was a bat boy for the New York Giants as a kid. So too, was William Frawley when he wasn't drinking you could find him at a game in a given city during the season.

Some of the bare bones facts of Ruth's life are covered and some of the stories attributed about Ruth are presented here. Left conspicuously out of the film are Ruth's first wife and daughter. This was a film intended for kids and that wouldn't have quite fit.

In a recent biography of Ruth, I learned that the Considine book wasn't even Considine's. Bob Considine was a fine journalist and reporter who was not a sportswriter per se. Ruth agreed to the memoirs while he was undergoing treatment for cancer to leave a permanent legacy. But he proved such a difficult subject to interview because he dominated the sessions with his own rollicking anecdotes when he wasn't in pain from the illness. Long time Ruth friend and noted baseball writer Fred Lieb helped Considine with the book with no credit as Lieb ghosted a whole lot of the book himself helped by his encyclopedic knowledge of Ruthiana.

In that era of the Twenties, what has been termed the Golden Age of Sports, Babe Ruth's was the brightest star in the sports world. He was a larger than life figure, down to the fact that his excesses were larger than life. He transformed his sport to one of power from one of speed. He drew sellout in every American League city, transformed the New York Yankees into the greatest sports franchise ever.

Ruth had a couple of good made for TV films about him that were closer to the truth. But he deserved what Lou Gehrig got, a big A budget film from someone like Samuel Goldwyn.

Still he did better in a biographical film than Jackie Robinson.

I know of no two human lives that are more clearly "stories" than that of the two great Yankee teammates, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Most lives a litany of events, some of which are part of "stories" that cut diagonally across the life rather than encompassing it and driving it forward. Those stories do not emanate from or thus reveal the character of the person portrayed.

Ruth was an undisciplined man-child with a prodigious talent that enabled him to reinvent and save his sport and made him the symbol of his era, a time when America was emerging as a world power and breaking the bonds of its own traditions to create a more modern and exciting way of living. But he offended not only the traditionalists but the businessmen who controlled his sport- or used to until he came along. When age and his lifestyle began to catch to him, they disposed of him for all but ceremonial purposes. Meanwhile his age passed and the world grew more serious. He wound up lonely and depressed and became a cancer victim at the early age of 53.

Gehrig was a serious, dutiful momma's boy, also blessed with a prodigious talent that thrust him into where he most hated to be- the limelight. It's interesting that the worst year of his prime was the one year he didn't have either Ruth or DiMaggio as a teammate, 1935. He fared much better in their shadow. He was noted, by those who noted him, as a strong, reliable workhorse of a man and a player, someone you could count on. He was amazingly beset by a disease which robbed him of his strength, the very quality in him people most admired. And that in turn, thrust him directly into the lime light. People didn't think he could respond but he looked into his heart and said what was there and nobody ever forgot it.

How could you miss telling stories like that? But amazingly, Hollywood has always seemed to get Lou's story right and the Babe's wrong. Even though there were casting problems in all the movies made about them, the quality of "Pride of the Yankees" and of "A Love Affair: The Eleanor and Lou Gehrig Story" is superb on both counts. Meanwhile "The Babe Ruth Story" is one of the worst movies ever made and both the TV movie "Babe Ruth" and the film "The Babe" are deeply flawed.

"Pride of the Yankees" is old fashioned Hollywood sentiment but done by experts. I find Teresa Wright's alternate clowning and crying to be a little too much and I've heard all the stories about Gary Cooper's attempts to learn how to play baseball, (he was a cowboy and an artist but no ball-player). But he was a great actor and he got to the essence of the character beautifully. His delivery of the final speech is perfect, for which reason he was asked to repeat it to the troops over and over during his travels during WWII. I'll be loving it- always.

"The Babe Ruth Story" casts a stumpy, potato-faced introvert, William Bendix, as the big, moon-faced extrovert, Babe Ruth. It's a competent "B" movie version of his life for the first half. It might have just been a disappointing follow-up to "Pride of the Yankees" if they'd left it at that but about halfway through the script suddenly delves into science fiction and turns Ruth into a maker of medical miracles, with one ridiculous scene after another. He is, however, unable to save himself in the end, or even the film.

All I saw of "Babe Ruth" was a few scenes but once I saw Stephen Lang wearing what appeared to be a plastic mask, which tried but failed to make him resemble Ruth, I wanted no part of it.

"The Babe" is the "Gone With the Wind" of Babe Ruth movies, which isn't saying much. But is a good retelling of his life and Goodman enacts the part superbly. It ends at the right moment, with Ruth hitting his last three home runs in one game in Pittsburgh to stick it to those who were jeering him. But Goodman is twice the size Ruth ever was. The Babe, as old photos show, was about 200 pounds when his career started and worked his way up to perhaps 250 pounds when he quit. Goodman must have been a minimum of 350 pounds when he filmed this movie and sent the wrong message: that you can be a blimp and still be the greatest player in the sport, an image that baseball people really resent.

While casting is not the only problem, it could have been improved and that might have helped. Physically, someone like Dick Foran or Wayne Morris would have been a better match for Gehrig than Cooper but they wouldn't have given as good a performance. Kurt Russell, (who played some minor league ball), or Jeff Bridges would have been a much better choice for "A Love Story", than Hermann. That other "Reilly", Jackie Gleason, would have been a much better choice than Bendix for "The Babe Ruth Story", (especially if he had eaten the script). Maybe the best time to do a Ruth movie and do it right would have been after Roger Maris broke his record. Either Claude Akins, (my favorite choice of all), or Simon Oakland would have made excellent Ruths. Ramon Bieri was a good Ruth in "A Love Story". I'm not sure who would play him these days.

Of course the best performance as Babe Ruth was by the guy who played him in "Pride of the Yankees".