Never mind that this supposed biography of professional baseball player Babe Ruth is entirely fiction (a brief search of his biographical information reveals a rougher upbringing); the more aggravating problem is how it is so stupid. The film-making is visually incompetent, as is the acting, but the worst aspects are the scenario and titles. The picture is stuffed with title cards, especially for exposition at the beginning—introducing handfuls of characters we're barely going to hear from again or whom we'd be better off not having seen. Episodes such as the dogcatcher and block of ice bits entirely fail at humor. Babe carving baseball bats and the indications of romance at the town's social go nowhere. Even worse is the irritating title cards, which mimic being folksy, with their stupid slang, bad jokes and intentionally misspelled words, which I guess were supposed to be remembered narration by one of Ruth's townsmen who's seen at his game in the beginning—otherwise, I don't see why there are quotation marks around every title card. I only counted three dialogue intertitles (that is, title cards stating what the seen characters say), and they occur near the end of the movie.
Some brief footage of Ruth playing baseball might be of some documentary interest.
