The movie attempts to present what sort of person baseball great Ty Cobb was, by showing the last several months of his life, focusing on his collaboration with Al Stump, to write Cobb's autobiography, starting in the summer of 1960 and running through the death of Cobb in July 1961. We get a few swirly flashback scenes of some grim moments in Cobb's life, primarily a few looks at the circumstances surrounding the shooting death of his father in 1905. The only baseball footage comes from one "memory" of Cobb's plus what is supposed to have been an old newsreel biography of his playing career that, for reasons unknown, focuses almost solely on scenes that supposedly took place during the 1916 season. So much of the film deals with Stump's life and activities in working with Cobb that the movie would have been more appropriately named "Stump."
The portrait of the elderly Cobb is not to be believed. He appears to be a drug-addicted (Painkillers) lunatic who went around with his pistol shooting into the air and at walls whenever he wanted to get someone's attention. According to this film, Cobb was a foul-mouthed man who sounded rather uneducated and a man whom all around feared for their safety. Coming from the fantasy pen of Al Stump, none of this in any way describes the real Ty Cobb, based on the evidence of all the people who did know him in his last years. In other words, anyone seeking to learn anything at all about Ty Cobb should look elsewhere.
If you like biography movies because they teach you about how people lived in the old days, this is also a film to be avoided because the total footage that is shown that is supposed to take place before the last year of Cobb's life is less than five minutes. If you want to see how realistic the baseball scenes are—forget it. Not counting the "newsreel" you see one at bat by Cobb, a double, and two stolen bases, each ending with a kick to the crotch with the second followed by a donnybrook. This is not a film about the life of this famous ballplayer, it is a film about several months near the end of his life with almost no time devoted to telling you about all the things he did in his life.
Even in that one baseball game that is depicted, we see no interaction between Cobb and his teammates—not even a view of a clubhouse. We see no manager of the Tigers—indeed, we never learn from this film that Cobb managed the Tigers for 6 years. A large part of Cobb's autobiography, the one he hired Stump to help him write, deals with Cobb's ongoing disputes with Tiger owner Frank Navin. There is no mention of Navin in this film. While Babe Ruth was mentioned, there were no scenes showing Cobb and Ruth on the baseball field, or in a hotel room, or playing golf together as they did. Perhaps they couldn't find an actor who looked anything like the Babe. Check that—after all, Tommy Lee Jones doesn't look anything like Ty Cobb and that didn't stop them.
What we have is a movie with much more cursing than necessary to set the mood, and for no particular reason, there was even a quasi-sex scene that seemed designed just to convince you even more that Cobb was a nasty old man. We know his family found him hard to get along with, but throughout his life he was polite in public and obliging to autograph seekers and others who visited him, especially if they wanted to talk about baseball. This film doesn't even suggest that he was ever nice to anyone.
If you have read other sources and know about the real Cobb, you know this movie is almost 100% concocted by the fantasies of Al Stump. If you knew little about this baseball great and believe anything you saw, you know less about him than you did before. Three times or more they declare that Cobb invented the style of baseball that featured aggressive base running and stealing bases and more, even though that is totally false.
With the simple title of "Cobb," any viewer would expect it to be about the man's whole life—or at least a large part of it, perhaps even the parts that made him famous. Another possible title that would have been more accurate is: "Cobb—ten months at the end of his life." As a fictional film this was a dreadfully boring show about a two-bit writer and a nasty old man who seemed like a lunatic. Full of excessive cussing and devoid of any reason to like either character, it would rate a 3 out of 10. But because it claims to portray a very real man and depicts someone far, far different from the real person, complete with a made-up memory scene of how Cobb's father died—one that Ty could not have told Stump because 1) it didn't happen that way at all, and 2) because Ty wasn't there at the time—I find this film rather offensive. So I give it the lowest score allowed here—a one.
The portrait of the elderly Cobb is not to be believed. He appears to be a drug-addicted (Painkillers) lunatic who went around with his pistol shooting into the air and at walls whenever he wanted to get someone's attention. According to this film, Cobb was a foul-mouthed man who sounded rather uneducated and a man whom all around feared for their safety. Coming from the fantasy pen of Al Stump, none of this in any way describes the real Ty Cobb, based on the evidence of all the people who did know him in his last years. In other words, anyone seeking to learn anything at all about Ty Cobb should look elsewhere.
If you like biography movies because they teach you about how people lived in the old days, this is also a film to be avoided because the total footage that is shown that is supposed to take place before the last year of Cobb's life is less than five minutes. If you want to see how realistic the baseball scenes are—forget it. Not counting the "newsreel" you see one at bat by Cobb, a double, and two stolen bases, each ending with a kick to the crotch with the second followed by a donnybrook. This is not a film about the life of this famous ballplayer, it is a film about several months near the end of his life with almost no time devoted to telling you about all the things he did in his life.
Even in that one baseball game that is depicted, we see no interaction between Cobb and his teammates—not even a view of a clubhouse. We see no manager of the Tigers—indeed, we never learn from this film that Cobb managed the Tigers for 6 years. A large part of Cobb's autobiography, the one he hired Stump to help him write, deals with Cobb's ongoing disputes with Tiger owner Frank Navin. There is no mention of Navin in this film. While Babe Ruth was mentioned, there were no scenes showing Cobb and Ruth on the baseball field, or in a hotel room, or playing golf together as they did. Perhaps they couldn't find an actor who looked anything like the Babe. Check that—after all, Tommy Lee Jones doesn't look anything like Ty Cobb and that didn't stop them.
What we have is a movie with much more cursing than necessary to set the mood, and for no particular reason, there was even a quasi-sex scene that seemed designed just to convince you even more that Cobb was a nasty old man. We know his family found him hard to get along with, but throughout his life he was polite in public and obliging to autograph seekers and others who visited him, especially if they wanted to talk about baseball. This film doesn't even suggest that he was ever nice to anyone.
If you have read other sources and know about the real Cobb, you know this movie is almost 100% concocted by the fantasies of Al Stump. If you knew little about this baseball great and believe anything you saw, you know less about him than you did before. Three times or more they declare that Cobb invented the style of baseball that featured aggressive base running and stealing bases and more, even though that is totally false.
With the simple title of "Cobb," any viewer would expect it to be about the man's whole life—or at least a large part of it, perhaps even the parts that made him famous. Another possible title that would have been more accurate is: "Cobb—ten months at the end of his life." As a fictional film this was a dreadfully boring show about a two-bit writer and a nasty old man who seemed like a lunatic. Full of excessive cussing and devoid of any reason to like either character, it would rate a 3 out of 10. But because it claims to portray a very real man and depicts someone far, far different from the real person, complete with a made-up memory scene of how Cobb's father died—one that Ty could not have told Stump because 1) it didn't happen that way at all, and 2) because Ty wasn't there at the time—I find this film rather offensive. So I give it the lowest score allowed here—a one.