Headin' Home

1920 biopic

Rating: 12/20

Plot: It's the true story of Babe Ruth's baseball beginnings, but only if you take out everything that happens in this and replace it with stuff that actually happened.

Don't get me wrong--I'm a big fan of Hollywood myth making. The biggest problems with this story of George Herman Ruth have nothing to do with the facts not being right. I mean, who wants to see six of the Babe's siblings die or Babe Ruth being ignored by his parents? The main problem is that the movie's boring, a hastily-put-together affair that fails to take advantage of any kind of charisma the Babe might have had. Sure, it's fun seeing a scrawny Ruth take a few swings, and he does appear to be a giant compared to everybody else in this movie, but he's an athlete and not an actor and it kind of shows. The storytelling is weak and cliched, although probably not as much for a movie from 1920. There's a love story subplot that I didn't really care about and some drama involving a dog that somebody was trying to turn into meat. I think. I probably blinked and missed a title card or seven. Speaking of title cards, this one leans far too heavily on them. I don't think I even did this much reading during the last foreign movie I watched. And these title cards might have been funny in 1920, but the weird attempts at this small-town vernacular and dialect just seem so silly about 100 years later. I mean, take a gander at some of these:

"That pink-letter feller thought he wuz th' whole red alphabet."
"Man for man, that spaghetti wuz stronger'n the' White Sox infield."
"The Volunteer Firemen's Quartette wuz tearin' the moss off the Old Aching Bucket." (No idea what this one means.)
"There wuzn't nothin' wrong that Babe couldn't do right."
"The young uns gave Babe the merry razzberry." (Good band name though.)
"The vamp put up an awful holler when Babe slipped her a deuce spot and blew before the eats were paid for." (Sorry. Should have put a [Spoiler Alert!] in front of that one.)

I'd love to live in a time when people talked like that, but it seems so artificial here. As does Babe's sister's hair. Her name was Pigtails in this, but what they did to this poor girl's head was ridiculous.

Oh, and you know what else? The Natural, specifically the part of the story that has Roy making his own bat and hitting home runs with it, completely rips off the true story of Babe Ruth. I didn't know that. Anyway, this might be worth checking out for baseball fans wanting to see about 2 minutes of one of the greats at work. It is hard to believe that a guy who looked like that was an athlete. It had to be great vision and incredibly fast hands or something. Surely it wasn't the little girl legs.