Worst Baseball Movie of All Time

 

    The film based on Ruth’s 1948 autobiography, The Babe Ruth Story, was an unmitigated disaster. To begin with, William Bendix was miscast as the Babe. In order to make him look like the former Yankee hero, makeup artists dyed his hair and gave him a prosthetic nose. Attempts to coach him on the finer points of Ruth’s swing were fruitless. John McCarten of New Yorker magazine wrote, “[Bendix] handles a bat as if it were as hard to manipulate as a barrel stave. Even with a putty nose, Mr. Bendix resembles Mr. Ruth not at all and he certainly does the hitter an injustice by representing him as a kind of Neanderthal fellow.” Physical disparities between the actor and baseball icon were the least of director Roy Del Ruth’s problems. The script was an absolute mess. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times observed, “[the film] has much more the tone of low-grade fiction than it has of a biography.” He was spot-on with that remark. Historical inaccuracies are rampant throughout the film—some more preposterous than others.

            --In one scene, the Babe’s second wife, Claire, warns him that he is tipping his pitches by sticking out his tongue. While it’s true that Ruth arrived in the majors with the bad habit of curling his tongue when he delivered curve balls, he had not yet met Claire during his time with the Red Sox. Another major oversight—Ruth’s first wife, Helen, is never mentioned in the film.

            --During the “called shot” sequence, Claire shouts at the Babe, “Don’t forget Johnny!” in reference to Johnny Sylvester—the boy Ruth famously promised a home run to. But the homer Ruth is said to have hit for Sylvester happened during the 1926 World Series against the Cardinals, not the ’32 Fall Classic vs. the Cubs.

            --In two of the film’s most ludicrous scenes, Ruth orders a glass of milk in a bar and heals a crippled boy by waving at him. In another laughable clip, the Babe hits a dog with a foul ball, severely wounding it. When he sees a little boy crying next to the fallen animal, he scoops it up and hurries out of the stadium in search of medical attention. Accompanied by the crying boy, he ends up at a local hospital, where a physician performs a successful operation, saving the dog’s life.

            Bendix himself once referred to the movie as the worst he ever made and said that he was embarrassed by the audience’s reaction at the premiere in Los Angeles. In particular, he alluded to a scene early in the film when the Babe is discovered by a scout while playing at St. Mary’s. The kids in the scene are all actual teenagers, but Bendix (at thirty-eight years of age) was forced by the director to appear wearing makeup. The final cut is unintentionally funny and, according to Bendix, L.A. moviegoers laughed when they saw it.

This topic is covered in depth along with many others in Lore of the Bambino: 100 Great Babe Ruth Stories, available in April through the Lyons Press.