Stealing Home

It feels a bit like TCM has been airing more 1980s movies in recent years. To be fair, all of these movies are over 35 years old now. In any case, one that I hadn't heard of before it showed up on TCM was Stealing Home. Having seen it now, I can see why I hadn't heard of it.

Mark Harmon plays Billy Wyatt, and as the movie opens he's doing groundskeeping work for one of those independent minor league baseball teams. He mentions that just six months earlier, his life was a mess as he was living in a motel with a waitress. He's informed that his mother is calling him on the pay phone just outside, and she has a message for him: a name from the past, Katie Chandler, has blown her brains out. Rather strangely, Katie left a last will and testament stipulating that she wished to be cremated and that her ashes be given to Billy, who would know what to do with them.

Flash back to when Billy was about 10 years old. His parents go the same place every year for their anniversary, and have hired the neighbors' teenage daughter Katie (Jodie Foster) to baby-sit Billy, who is a big baseball fan. Katie is a bit of a free spirit and takes Billy from his home in one of the Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia to the Jersey shore where her family has a vacation house. Katie also gives Billy baseball pendant, reminding him he's always a baseball player.

Fast-forward to about 16 years of age. It's the spring, and the big baseball game of the season. Teenaged Billy (played by William McNamara) and his best friend Alan Appleby (Jonathan Silverman) are on their private school baseball team together, and Billy wins the game by stealing home plate, a relatively rare feat in the sport. Billy is also approached by a scout for the Philadelphia Phillies. This enables them to get home, where Billy is supposed to do a favor for Alan by telling young Robin Parks, who lives closer to Billy, that Alan would like to take her to the prom. Unfortunately, Robin says that she's been in love with Billy for years, and the two wind up having sex togeether. Even more unfortunate is that Billy's father gets in a fatal car crash that night. Billy thinks about giving up baseball forever.

The Wyatts go over to the summer house that the Chandlers have, together with Katie (but seemingly not her parents) and Alan in tow. Alan has the stirrings of a sexual experience by engaging in voyeurism with an older woman who is renting another beach house and is actually teasing Alan because she knows he's watching. Billy has a falling out with Katie, who has also informed him that she's about to elope to Paris with some guy she barely knows. It turns out to be the last time Billy saw Katie.

We then return to the present day, where Billy isn't certain what to do with Katie's ashes, at least not until he goes to see Alan (Harold Ramis), who now owns a sporting goods store. The two relive their past in ways that are thoroughly illegal, in part because Katie's free spirit led her to take young Billy on some illegal adventures. It gives Billy ideas on what to do with Katie's ashes, although not all of the ideas are going to work out.

Critics at the time savaged Stealing Home, and I can see why. It's a pastiche of nostalgia tropes, combined with a whole lot of characters doing things that they would never do in real life. Frankly, one thing that shocked me considering this is Boomer porn (Billy would have been born about 1950, although the teenaged music references are all from the early 1960s) is that there's no reference to John F. Kennedy being shot. None of it works well, and the ending is mawkish. That would probably explain why this movie isn't well known today.