thirdsqurl Possibly the worst baseball bio-pic ever made. No relation to Ruth's actual career, you'd never guess he started out as a pitching star before graduating to the Sultan of Swat. Every home run Goodman hits goes out of the stadium. Not into the stands, but out of the stadium. When he's not hitting gigantic home runs, he flails around at the plate like a drunken klutz. It's complete nonsense. Ruth was a terrific athlete most of his career with a lifetime .342 batting average, only growing overweight toward the end. Goodman flaunts his bulk with no hint of athleticism and doesn't seem to play any actual baseball, he only shows up to hit the homers. He must be really good, too, because he barely has any teammates worth mentioning. Ruth dominated the Roaring 20s as a larger than life figure. Goodman's Ruth is merely large. If you wish to see Babe Ruth portrayed as a gross clownish moron, this is your chance.

mjprigge I found this movie to be appallingly bad. The actually story of Babe Ruth is fascinating, but the movie treats him as the same caricature that popular memory has created. Goodman's portrayal is shallow and treads on parody. He does manage to copy the voice of the Babe fairly well, but that only picks up about an hour into the film. Facts are disregarded throughout the story and confusing leaps through time distort his career.Not for baseball fans, not for history fans, not for movie fans. The only people who might enjoy this are Red Sox fans, as the whole two hours does a great injustice to the most famous Yankee of them all.

dwpollar 1st watched 5/15/2007 - 7 out of 10(Dir-Arthur Hiller): Well done depiction of baseball hero Babe Ruth with perfectly cast John Goodman in the title role who plays him with just the right amount of jollyness with the unexpected shows of vulnerability that seems to make sense for a man who lived like he did. He was abandoned as a young child by his parents supposedly because he was "bad" and grew up in a Catholic boys school with no real mother or father. He gained a skill while in the school and became an excellent baseball player. So much so, that a major league baseball team adopted him when he became a young adult. He was then traded promptly to the Boston Red Sox and his excellent baseball history began and then continued with the New York Yankees, where he was nicknamed the Bronx bomber or the Bambino and the stadium was then called "The House that Ruth Built." Between all of this, he married, divorced, re-married, caroused the bars, treated the kids who came to the games with love and did everything BIG. Kelly McGillis is excellent as the Babe's 2nd love interest and the one who really accepted him for who he was(as bizarre as some of his antics were). His famed visit to the children's hospital promising the sick child two home runs and coming thru with it and his heralded calling out of the home run to center field in the World Series is also depicted as expected. The movie also included little things like him not getting any money from the Baby Ruth candy bar company when they obviously named it after him. All of these things combine into a very entertaining and well put together movie by director Arthur Hiller. Sure, it's not as hard-nosed as it could have been but I think this was the kind of movie that should have been made about this larger-than-life baseball legend, especially with the lighter John Goodman in the lead role.

schappe1 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".