Babe Ruth

I love this movie because I had a small non-speaking roll. I was the father listening to a game on the radio with my wife and son. I was brilliant, but IMD will not add me as an uncredited roll. But it's me, watch the movie and you will see. I have a pipe and everything. Martin J. Newcott (father listening to the radio)

This movie portrays Ruth as a womanizing, hard drinking, gambling, overeating sports figure with a little baseball thrown in. Babe Ruths early life was quite interesting and this was for all intents and purposes was omitted in this film. Also, Lou Gehrig was barely covered and this was a well know relationship, good bad or indifferent, it should have been covered better than it was. His life was more than all bad. He was an American hero, an icon that a lot of baseball greats patterned their lives after. I feel that I am being fair to the memory of a great baseball player that this film completely ignored. Shame on the makers of this film for capitalizing on his faults and not his greatness.

If you've seen either the sappy, sanitized 1948 THE BABE RUTH STORY with the woefully undersized William Bendix as the Babe; or THE BABE with the consistently over-sized John Goodman (Ruth was never that large)...you owe it to yourself to watch this take.

An honest effort has been made to depict the Babe with all his colorful sides and darker, less likable shades to his character. it's nearly an impossible task to portray a larger than life, legendary personage, but Steven Lang does a more than credible job.

Great care has been taken to depict the era, styles and mindsets of all the principals in Ruth's life and Ruth/Lang is on side the cheerful, over the top big kid and also the greedy, petulant, spoiled brat who feels he should always get his way, even when he knows he's dead wrong.

There's a clever cameo in mid film by Pete Rose, the current all time baseball career hit leader, as Ty Cobb (who's record he broke).

Sadly, life in regards to how Ruth dealt with his two wives and daughters didn't come to him as easily as baseball did. Here he doesn't fare as well as he did on the babeball diamond. The film touches on all this and his desire to be a big league manager, despite his failings to manage himself are also dealt with

honestly.

Actors almost never look like players. They're too small, they don't have the rhythm, the speed, the power, the coordinations that athletes do in their prime. It's almost always embarrassing for the actor to pretend that he does.

Having said that, Lang does a credible job in his portrayal of Ruth. He seems to have some athletic skill and he seems to have studied very carefully Ruth's stance and swing and stride. At those moments, he's as believable as any actor who has played the part.

Where his portrayal suffers is in the scenes off the field. Lang is not as big or bear-like as Ruth. How many men are? He tries to capture Ruth's gregariousness and talented actor that he is, comes close, but not close enough for me.

For the most part the film-makers cast actors small of stature to make Lang's Ruth appear bigger and more imposing. But not in every scene, which a unforgivably dumb as periodically then Lang looks small, the spell is broken and we forget to suspend disbelief.

Another major flaw: Lang's prosthetic nose (Ruth had an odd, fleshy nose) is gray in color and obvious. Also obvious are the shoulder pads beneath his uniform.

We've seen the story before in books and in movies. Little if anything is new here. Just the same, any baseball fan, certainly any Ruth fan will find the film compelling enough to sit thru, but I'm still waiting for someone to tell this legendary figure's story right from beginning to end. It's a problem of casting. It would probably require locating another Babe Ruth. Can't count on someone like that coming along any time soon.

This 1991 NBC-TV movie aired six months before John Goodman's big-screen version of the life of Babe Ruth came out. For my money, there is no comparison between the two. The TV production isn't perfect but it presents the Babe's story with more depth and complexity than Goodman's one-dimensional telling. I especially enjoyed the film's depiction of the complex love-hate relationship Ruth had with Yankee manager Miller Huggins, who always understood his star player's brilliance and also kept trying to point out why Ruth's own character flaws would never let him become a manager or leader of players. The TV-movie rightly notes how Ruth never fulfilled his dream of managing the Yankees because of his flaws, while the horrible Goodman version tries to push the falsehood that Ruth was denied what should have been his for the taking.

This film makes a great companion piece to "Eight Men Out" since the story starts with Ruth's arrival in New York in 1920, one year after the Black Sox Scandal and when his home run exploits literally saved baseball from ruin. Indeed, the continuity between the two films is even accentuated with John Anderson reprising his "Eight Men Out" role as Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis.