Three Men and a Baby is a 1987 comedy film starring Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg, Nancy Travis, and Ted Danson, and directed by Leonard Nimoy. It follows the mishaps and adventures of three bachelors as they attempt to adapt their lives to pseudo-fatherhood with the arrival of one of the men's love child. The script was based on the 1985 French film Trois hommes et un couffin (Three Men and a Cradle). It was distributed by Touchstone Pictures.
Three Men and a Baby was the biggest box office hit of that year, surpassing Fatal Attraction and eventually grossing US$167 million in the US alone. The movie won the 1988 ASCAP award and the 1988 People's Choice Award for Favorite Comedy Motion Picture. It was followed by a 1990 sequel, Three Men and a Little Lady. A new sequel (titled Three Men and a Bride) supposedly in development would reunite Selleck, Guttenberg and Danson.
Plot
Architect Peter Mitchell (Tom Selleck), cartoonist Michael Kellam (Steve Guttenberg) and actor Jack Holden (Ted Danson) are happy living their lives as bachelors in their lofty New York City apartment. They all have different girlfriends, successful jobs and a carefree and somewhat hedonistic lifestyle. This is disrupted when a baby arrives on their doorstep one day. A note with the child, Mary, indicates that it is Jack's, the result of an affair with a recent co-star. The baby arrives in Jack's absence – he is in Turkey shooting a B movie, leaving Peter and Michael to fend for themselves in taking care of the child, something in which their lack of experience befuddles them.
At one point, Peter and Michael are mistakenly led to believe that they are to deliver Mary to two men who arrive at their door asking for "the package". They discover moments before their departure that the men are drug dealers who were actually seeking a package of heroin. They retrieve the infant, leaving the men with a bottle of powdered milk.
What results is a major change to the men's lives as they try to adjust to surrogate fatherhood—balancing the demands of work, a social schedule and the rearing of a child. Soon their paternal instincts take hold, and they grow attached to the child. Eventually, when Jack returns, Peter and Michael do not hesitate in taking their revenge and passing all responsibility of looking after Mary to Jack, but Jack quickly grows to love his daughter.
The drug dealers, demanding payment, eventually ransack the men's apartment looking for their drugs. The men formulate a plan to trap the dealers when they negotiate a deal to deliver the illicit goods. With a recording of the conversation, the men prove their innocence to the police and the dealers are arrested.
At the end of the movie, the baby's mother, an English woman named Sylvia (Nancy Travis), arrives, asking for Mary back. Moments before her departure to England, she realizes she cannot give up her career to raise her daughter alone, and the three men, having grown attached to Mary, cannot bear to lose Mary, and rush to the airport to persuade Sylvia to stay in America, but they arrive just as Sylvia's plane leaves. Defeated, the men return to their apartment, where they find both Sylvia and Mary. The men quickly invite her to move into their apartment with them, and she agrees.
Cast
- Tom Selleck as Peter Mitchell
- Steve Guttenberg as Michael Kellam
- Ted Danson as Jack Holden
- Nancy Travis as Sylvia Bennington
- Margaret Colin as Rebecca
- Alexandra Amini as Patty
- Celeste Holm as Mrs. Holden
- Francine Beers as Woman at Gift Shop
- Lisa and Michelle Blair as Mary Bennington
- Philip Bosco as Det. Sgt. Melkowitz
- Barbara Budd as Actress
- Michael Burgess as Handsome Man at Party
- Claire Cellucci as Angelyne
- Eugene Clark as Man #1 at Party
- Derek de Lint as Jan Clopatz
- Jacob Strackeljahn as Juan Pablo Jr.
- Jeff Kingsley as Dr. Octavius Agustus Steelex
- Dave Foley as Grocery Store Clerk
Production
The eponymous baby was played by twins Lisa Blair and Michelle Blair.
The soundtrack included the Peter Cetera song "Daddy's Girl," which was used for the movie's big music montage sequence.
Urban legend
Shots from the film showing what some believe are a shotgun and a young boy.
In the final cut of the movie, there is a scene, just over an hour into the film, in which Jack Holden (Ted Danson) and his mother (Celeste Holm) walk through the house with the baby. As they do so, they pass a background window on the left-hand side of the screen, and a black outline that appears to resemble a rifle pointed downward can be seen behind the curtains. As the characters walk back past the window 40 seconds later, a human figure can be seen in that window. A persistent urban legend began circulating August 1990 (shortly before the film's sequel, Three Men and a Little Lady, premiered) that this was the ghost of a boy who had been killed in the house where the movie was filmed. The most common version of this rumor was that a nine-year-old boy committed suicide with a shotgun there, explaining why the house was vacant because the grieving family left. This notion was discussed on the first episode of TV Land: Myths and Legends in January 2007 and was referenced in "Hollywood Babylon", a second season episode of the TV series Supernatural.
Danson's character standing next to a cardboard cutout of himself.
The figure is actually a cardboard cutout "standee" of Jack, wearing a tuxedo and top hat, that was left on the set. This prop was created as part of the storyline, in which Jack, an actor, appears in a dog food commercial, but this portion of the story was cut from the final version of the film. The standee does show up later in the film, however, when Jack stands next to it as the baby's mother comes to reclaim her child. The website snopes.com contends that the figure in the first scene looks smaller from its appearance in the latter scene because of the distance and angle of the shot, and because the curtains obscure its outstretched arms. As for the contention that a boy died in the house, all the indoor scenes in the film were shot on a Toronto sound stage, and no residential dwellings were used for interior filming.
Reception
The critical reception of Three Men and a Baby was generally positive. Film critic Roger Ebert, while noting several aspects he saw as flaws, said of it "Because of Selleck and his co-stars... the movie becomes a heartwarming entertainment." He gave it 3 (out of four) stars. It holds a 72% "fresh" rating on the movie review aggregation site, Rotten Tomatoes.
Box office
Three Men and a Baby grossed USD$168 million.
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This page uses content from the English Wikipedia page Three Men and a Baby. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. Text from Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. |