10 Things I Still Can’t Get Over About ‘Three Men and a Baby’

There is truly no shortage of amazing things about Three Men and a Baby being the box office champ of 1987. The fact that it played in theaters for five months, then was brought back into theaters for Memorial Day weekend. The fact that the other top 10 movies it beat out included Fatal Attraction, Moonstruck, and The Secret of My Success. The fact that Lethal Weapon and Beverly Hills Cop II were the only action films in the top 10 that year. Truly, a simpler time.

data: Box Office Mojo

The other big Did You Know item about this movie is that it is based on a 1985 French film, Three Men and a Cradle (Trois Hommes et un Couffin). Setting aside for a moment the fact that the French word for “cradle” looks a lot like “coffin,” and what that might mean for attitudes about parenthood, we should note that said French won the Cesar award (the French version of the Oscar, basically) for Best Film and was nominated at the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film.

The single most fascinating and incredulous thing about Three Men and a Baby has nothing to do with a baby getting dropped off to be raised by three single men in New York City. It has everything to do with the apartment that is shared by Peter (Tom Selleck), Michael (Steve Guttenberg), and Jack (Ted Danson). Now, granted, the vagaries of New York City real estate are never all that interesting to people who don’t live in New York City, but a penthouse apartment along Central Park West even in 1987 must’ve cost a fortune. Normally, three single roommates would rent a place, but in this case they’ve very clearly bought, because Peter keeps making improvements on the place, seemingly adding new rooms at will, meanwhile Michael is drawing a never-ending mural around the hallway to the elevator.

My first question in a situation like this is “where is the money coming from?” We know Peter is an architect (because during the opening montage we see Michael affix a plaque to the wall that tells us that Peter is an architect), and those fellas make money. But then why not just get a decent place on your own if you make that kind of money? Is Peter doing a favor for his less financially-well-established pals? Michael is a cartoonist of some renown, and Jack is a struggling actor (though one who gets cast in movies that have enough money to shoot in Turkey for weeks at a time, so how struggling can he really be?), so I suppose it’s logical that Peter owns the apartment and is subletting to his friends.

Considering the likelihood that all three men could probably afford decent places of their own, we’re left to conclude that they have decided to pool their resources to trade in three decent NYC apartments for one one totally baller penthouse. Perhaps as a statement of defiance against a world that wants to stamp out their bachelorhood. Three single men in their 30s have thrown in on a fuck palace on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, famous neighborhood of Rosemary from Rosemary’s Baby, the Seinfeld gang (sans George), and Janosz from Ghostbusters II.

The aesthetic of the place is quasi-minimalist, though that’s contrasted with the frankly ridiculously ostentatious mural out in the hallway, a mural which depicts the central trio as New Yorker cartoons of top-hatted dandies about town. Are these three womanizers (again, that opening montage is a revolving door of women they bring back to their pad) evincing a bro aesthetic? Peter treats his party guests to tapes of old Knicks games and later sneers at the symphony. But the rest of the apartment reads less “man cave” and more “sophisticated flat with wine racks and lots of natural light.” I will spend the rest of my life trying to map out a floor plan to this apartment, one which appears to include a film room, a drawing room, some kind of garden patio (greenhouse???), and at least one ghost.

Tom Selleck was famously the first choice to play Indiana Jones, but couldn’t get clear of Magnum P.I. to do it, and as a result, his film career has always seemed more like a “what might have been.” But Three Men and a Baby is unquestionably his biggest success and signature big-screen venture (sorry, Mr. Baseball). You can see why Hollywood would have wanted him in this medium. He doesn’t evince “TV star” vibes at all. He’s funny but commands attention at all times (it’s the mustache); he’s handsome without being pretty. He’s laid-back, perhaps to a degree that makes him ill-fitting for a comeback in today’s hyper-aggressive blockbuster climate (remember how odd a fit Robert Redford’s laissez-faire delivery was for the Marvel universe in Winter Soldier?). But Three Men and a Baby was the perfect-sized project for Selleck’s talent, even if TV has proved to be his most reliable home.

You wouldn’t think a movie about three uptown bachelors raising a surprise infant would be so indebted to Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine, but here we are. The opening credits montage/parade of female conquests is scored to the group’s “Bad Boys” (get it?), and then Peter’s sprawling birthday party in the film’s opening sequence heavily features “Conga.”

But it’s not just Gloria who defined this movie musically. A later montage, after the drug-deal subplot is taken care of but before Sylvia returns, as the boys become pretty good at the dad thing and have steadily fallen deeper and deeper in love with baby Mary, is scored to “Daddy’s Girl” by Peter Cetera, and a more reliable voice for ’80s middlebrow movie music you will not find.

And then, over the closing credits (where we get another mini-montage, this time with Sylvia having joined the group), the song is “The Minute I Saw You,” sung by John Parr (another voice that could only exist in the ’80s, he of the St. Elmo’s Fire hit “Man in Motion”). “The Minute I Saw You” manages to have songwriting credits from Marvin Hamlisch, David Foster, and Carole Bayer Sager, who are basically the adult-contemporary movie-ballad version of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird playing together on the 1992 U.S. Olympic basketball team.

The fact that all anybody ever wants to talk about re: Three Men and a Baby is the “ghost” makes it one of the least interesting aspects of the movie in 2017, if only because it’s so thoroughly been debunked. The thing is, when the movie was released and in its early years on home video, this was a great urban legend, because it really did look creepy when Jack and his mother (Oscar winner Celeste Holm) walk out of Jack’s bedroom with Mary and you get a fleeting glimpse of a figure in the window. And because internet culture didn’t exist back then, the legend could get passed around and gain credence in a “Mikey from the Life cereal ads died from eating Pop Rocks” kind of way. But thirty years on, we’ve been repeatedly reminded that these scenes were filmed on a soundstage, not in an apartment where a young boy may have committed suicide; and we’ve repeatedly been reminded that there is a stand-up cut-out of Jack in his room, which we see more clearly in a later scene. Current higher-resolution transfers of the film don’t even look as much like a ghost on first-blush anymore. It’s obviously Ted Danson in a top hat in that window. Modernity ruins everything, but especially old urban legends.

It’s still the craziest that a full third of this movie about three single men raising an infant together is spent on a subplot about smuggled heroin and whether the boys can thread the needle of getting rid of the drugs without being arrested by the cops or killed by the drug dealers. It’s not that the scenes aren’t fun — character actors Philip Bosco and Paul Guilfoyle seem to be having a lot of fun as the cop and the drug dealer, respectively — but adding in these thriller/caper elements really just steals a lot of time from the fertile ground of the film’s central premise. It comes straight out of the original French film, too, so it’s not like this was an American intrusion, but it does sometimes feel like the movie felt it necessary to insert a more masculine genre into the more feminized premise of the movie.

Like almost any ’80s movie, the sexual politics are really fucked. Michael is the dictionary definition of the Nice Guy, playing the sensitive shoulder to cry on, even bringing out a hand-puppet of his “famous” cartoon character (a beatnik riff on Chester Cheetah, seemingly) in order to get one particular woman on the rebound into bed. Also, the idea of the charming womanizer has really fallen out of fashion now, but to the film’s credit, Jack — the biggest womanizer of the three — is generally depicted like a buffoon in the film. And the movie also does a good job with Peter’s open relationship with Rebecca (Margaret Colin), a woman who has zero interest in raising a child and isn’t particularly judged for it by the movie. (Try to ignore that by the time we get to Three Men and a Little Lady, Peter has forgotten about Rebecca entirely and is now madly in love with doting mother Sylvia.)

The script treats Sylvia as a major afterthought, there only to instigate the story (by dropping Mary off) and then later complicate it (by returning to take Mary home). That lack of care shows in a lot of the details. Like how Sylvia couldn’t afford to take care of Mary or hire good child care, yet she could afford two round-trip tickets from London to New York in the span of a summer? Or how Sylvia is British despite the fact that the story doesn’t really necessitate that at all, and Nancy Travis is also not British?

The fact that Leonard “Spock” Nimoy directed Three Men and a Baby is wild. It’s the biggest mismatch of personal brand and artistic output since finding out that Sidney Poitier directed Ghost Dad.

Where to stream Three Men and a Baby