Headin' Home

Headin' Home
1920
Directed By Lawrence C. Windom



SYNOPSIS

Babe Ruth (himself) lives in a small town in the sticks and dreams of playing baseball... but he's a laughingstock of the whole town on the ball field. He joins the team of a neighboring town and finds success. Soon the New York Yankees coming calling.



MY THOUGHTS

The life of Babe Ruth couldn't be more inaccurate if it took place on the moon.

Ruth's "humble small-town' was actually Baltimore. This is hardly the town of Haverlock that appears on screen. Haverlock is like the idyllic small towns in 1950's sitcoms... or that America that conservative commentators wish the country would return to, even though it never ever existed.
His family lived above a saloon that his father ran, not in a pleasant country home. Ruth led a rough young life and wound up being put in a special all boys school to keep him out of trouble.
The film also glosses over the later facts the Ruth started out as a pitcher and began his career with the Boston Red Sox.

I'm not an expert on silent films. I've seen many of the important ones, German Expressionist, Russian and some of the early great American ones and classic comedy shorts. Those films were excellent at SHOWING the audience the action, along with the occasional title card announcing a line of dialogue or a change of scenery.
Headin' Home practically has a title card before every shot explaining what we're going to see. Without them, the film would be confusing because it did such a poor job of SHOWING what was happening.
The title cards use a lame hick vernacular (Th' instead of the, wuz instead of was, etc.) that gets very annoying, very quick. If it was intended as humor, it failed miserably.

Also a failure was the script. It was a total hammy bore and may have been written by a 3rd grader. Several lengthy sequences appear and have nothing to further the plot. There's a long scene about a dogcatcher trying to do his job (with "comical" results.) This and other scenes seemingly only exist to pad out the running time of the film to a whopping 71 minutes.

The only great thing about the film is Babe Ruth. Not because of his acting, but because we see him as a young player in the prime of his career. Several scenes show Ruth in his Yankees uniform and on the field (the field is actually the Polo Grounds, home of the New York Giants)
Ruth was already a star... but not yet a superstar and legend. He would be that by the end of the decade.

His presence is probably the only thing that kept this pointless film from being lost to the sands of time, like so many silent films.