This movie for me is like a warm blanket. I have to watch it at least once a year. I stumbled across it when it was on late one night here in Oz & from the first few minutes I was hooked. It is just such a magical story. I LOVE, love, love everything about it, the actors, their characters, the first love, the relationships, the setting, the era, it's just wonderful. Not to mention the freaking AWESOME soundtrack. Billy's house & the summer house on the beach are the kind of homes everyone would love to grow up in, they are perfect places for childhood, adolescent & adult memories to be nurtured. 'Be my friend' watch this movie,it is inspiring. :)

I first watched this in the theater when I was 15, and I was bored by it. Then one night it was on cable and I decided to rewatch it. My heart is aching, because twenty years has made such a difference in how I see this movie. This movie is about loss. Lost dreams, lost loves, lost potential, lost chances of making amends. Jodie Foster was heartbreaking. A girl from a well to do family who could just never get her life together. A woman/child who in some ways was mature beyond her years but also immature for her years. Foster nails this performance, and in fact I think this is her most touching performance. In the flashback at the end where she is on the pier aching for a dream escape from her life, you can feel her want and quiet desperation. "See that's all I really want to do, Billy Boy. I want to leap off this pier and fly high in the air and hang out with the wind and drift with the clouds. And at night with the moon full and the sea wild, I'd meet my lover high on a cliff and we'd swoop down into the ocean and swim all the way down and touch the bottom... up through the dark water and break the surface! And then we'd fly to Jamaica for pina coladas. God I wish I could do that." William McNamara in one of his best roles. He played this with innocence and sensitivity, and was appealing. The downsides: Mark Harmon does his best, but I felt that at times his performance brought the film down. When he raced to fling her ashes over the pier, I wanted to be more touched but he just didn't do it for me. The scenes with Appleby were OK when they were younger, but Harold Ramis was wasted in this film. I am from East Falls, Philadelphia, so I appreciated the trip down memory lane with the Philly and south Jersey scenes. I'd recommend watching this. Today I purchased the DVD and will probably rewatch it soon.

"Stealing Home" takes place over a number of years, perhaps 25 or so, from the 1960s to the 1980s. Billy Wyatt as a young boy of 10 has Katie Chandler (20-something Jodie Foster, playing a 16-year old) as a babysitter. Katie is unconventional, smokes and borrows the car without permission, and Billy is attracted to that. Even with their difference in ages, Billy never gives up.Mark Harmon plays the adult 30-something Billy, and as the movie opens we see him arriving at a baseball stadium, not major leagues, at 5:45AM, he stripes the field, does a few other things, and dresses into his uniform. Most of the movie is then told in flashback.As a teenager Billy (William McNamara) was a promising ballplayer, and was even invited to a big league summer camp. But Billy never realized his dream, and got sidetracked.SPOILERS. As a down and out adult, not very happy, Billy gets news that Katie has died. She leaves her ashes to Billy, saying that he will know what to do with them. He is puzzled, has no clue, but gradually remembers his times with Katie, her love of the water, and scatters them at sea from a pier. He also gets the motivation to return to baseball, and that's where we found him in the opening scene. He gets on base, has to steal home from third base, mirroring a scene from his teen years. Thus the name of the movie.

"Stealing Home" is a film that will resonate with a section of the movie viewing public because it presents a story which will be easily loved. Directors Steven Kampmann and William Porter, who also wrote the screen play, show they can evoke the era in which the picture takes place. Both of these gentlemen know a thing or two about how to project the right atmosphere through the use of the popular music of the time.Although no date is given, it's clearly the early sixties when Billy and his best friend, Alan, come of age. It's the summer and they are spending it, like always, at the beach where their wealthy families seem to keep a home. There are three periods in which the film is set, once when Billy is about ten, then as a teen ager, and then as a young man in his twenties.Throughout the film, we watch the love between Katie, the friend of the Brown family, as she babysits the young Billy. Then, as a teen ager, Billy's love for Katie is made clear and it's returned by her. Katie is six years older, it's a love that consumes them during one summer after Billy's father is killed in a car accident. The last part of the film shows us Billy returning home as he has been called because Katie has named him to be the disposer of her ashes after she commits suicide. It's a beautiful love story, and it's easy to see why viewers love it. The best thing in the film are William McNamara, as the teen age Billy and Jodie Foster, who is Katie, the eternally beautiful Katie, who for some reason of movie magic, never seems to age. The supporting cast is excellent, John Shea, Blair Brown, Harold Ramis, among them.This is a good summer movie to watch. It's sunniness will warm any viewer looking for a good romantic way to spend some time.