To say that Babe Ruth was a dominant force is like saying that Mount Vesuvius spewed a little lava.
Firmly stands the Babe in popular culture, in part because of portrayals in films. “The pattern of the drama, with its Horatio Alger stamp—rags to riches and romance—is obviously contrived, and the personal characterizations are all of them second-grade stock,” wrote the New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther of the 1948 movie The Babe Ruth Story. “Mr. [William] Bendix is straight from the smoke-house and Claire Trevor pulls all the heart-throb stops as a little showgirl who marries the great man and sticks by through thick and thin.”
Bendig was a character actor famed for “playing all manner of lugs, both loveable and dangerous,” according to his biography on the Turner Classic Movies web site. Credits include the Alfred Hitchcock movie Lifeboat, the Abbott & Costello movie Who Done It?, and the 1964 thriller Seven Days in May. Perhaps Bendix’s best-known role was the title character in the 1950s television series The Life of Riley.
Babe Ruth, a 1991 NBC tv-movie, starred Stephen Lang as the Babe, Donald Moffat as Jacob Ruppert, and Bruce Weitz as Miller Huggins. Howard Rosenberg of the Los Angeles Times lauded, “Lang has some of the size to play Ruth and, with tutoring from Rod Carew, the right-handed actor has developed a fairly convincing left-handed stroke and, with makeup, a prominent nose to match.” Richard Huff of Variety also praised Lang—“he does his job convincingly.”
Art LaFleur played Babe Ruth in a dream sequence in the 1994 film The Sandlot. Benny “The Jet” Rodriguez, the best player on his sandlot baseball team, has a dream in which he talks with the Yankee slugger, who offers him advice on confronting “The Beast,” a dog guarding the house belonging to the baseball field’s neighbor; balls are gone forever when the kids hit them over the fence. One particular ball poses a major problem for Scotty Smalls, a newcomer who’s unfamiliar with baseball—he brings a ball owned by his stepfather to the sandlot; it’s signed by Babe Ruth. When Benny hits it over the fence, it’s gone forever. Presumably.
Ruth’s ghost counsels Benny, “Everybody gets one chance to do something great. Most people never take the chance, either ’cause they’re too scared or they don’t recognize it when it spits on their shoes. This is your big chance, and you shouldn’t let it go by. Remember when you busted the guts out of the ball the other day? Someone’s telling you something, kid. If I was you, I’d listen.”
As Ruth disappears, he offers final words of inspiration: “Remember, kid, there’s heroes and there’s legends. Heroes get remembered. But legends never die. Follow your heart, kid. And you’ll never go wrong.”
Eventually, “The Beast” is discovered to be a friendly, humongous dog named Hercules. His owner is a former Negro League ballplayer, portrayed by James Earl Jones.
In the 1992 film The Babe, John Goodman embodied the Sultan of Swat. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone wrote that Goodman was “ideally cast.” In an interview with Clifford Terry of the Chicago Tribune, Goodman offered insight to Ruth’s boisterous, almost childlike nature. “I don’t think the Babe had an underlying meanness,” said Goodman. “It was maybe an emptiness in the middle. I read an interesting quote that I tried to use as much as I could. Somebody who knew him quite well was asked about him, and he said, ‘You know, I don’t think Babe ever loved anybody in his life.’ I based most everything on Robert Creamer’s outstanding … biography. For example, I watched a lot of old film, but I could never figure out how to do Ruth’s home-run trot until I read a simple description of it in the book, and I was in.”
A version of this article appeared on www.thesportspost.com on February 6, 2016.