FILMS IN REVIEW, 3/88, p. 165, Charles Sawyer

Three Men And A Baby is a total delight: gentle, touching and very funny. [..] Early scenes between the baby and her new fathers lean heavily on the obvious, but that's simply a prelude to a deep and touching attachment between the men and the baby.

[......]

By letting his three charming co-stars be themselves, I suspect Nimoy is most responsible for the immense appeal of this charmer. However, all three actors are excellent and Marvin Hamlisch's music adds a bright and bouncy touch.

Three Men And A Baby is based on a successful French film of a couple years back. I for one am glad someone saw the wisdom of a well-done American version.

LOS ANGELES TIMES, 11/25/87. Calendar/p. 1, Michael Wilmington

Three Men and a Baby is an Americanization of one of the biggest recent French box-office hits: Coline Serreau's Three Men and a Cradle. Serreau's movie was fairly frothy, and this one is frothier still.

[.....] Where before, much of the humor came from a woman's amused reaction to the sudden maternal problems of three definitively anti-marriage bachelors, this adaptation - written and directed by men - is more coy, more cutesypoo. But it has the likability of the first movie. The people who made it have carried over much of the original's weightless, sweet-tempered flavor.

[.....] Despite their easy camaraderie, it's hard to figure out why these three are living together-or why they never hire a nurse. Danson's gypsy actor looks as if he could use help with the rent, but do a successful architect-who designs penthouses like this-and a nationally syndicated cartoonist need roomies?

MONTHLY FILM BULLETIN, 4/88, p. 120, Geoff Brown

Hollywood's versions of French comedies do not usually hit the box-office jackpot[...] But Three Men and a Baby has been an exception. The baby, obviously, helps: this is the season of Baby Boom, Raising Arizona, and films resurrecting family values in strange disguises. The baby's actual mother proves of little account, popping up only when the film is already running out of steam. As in the original, the comic mileage is extracted from three determined bachelors entering the brave new world of baby foods, nappy-changing, and wiping up the cute little bundle's 'diddles'. This was thin enough in the French version, though Trois hommes et un couffin glided along on the appealing playing, Coline Serreau's fluent direction, and the cameraman's skilful lighting of the rambling interior set. Hollywood's hard-driven edition only emphasises the flimsy material.

NEW YORK, 12/7/87, p. 152, David Denby

In another men-without-women picture, Three Men and a Baby, Tom Selleck, Ted Danson, and Steve Guttenberg play swinging bachelors who sober up all too quickly when a baby girl is left on their doorstep. This proto-sitcom has a good deal less force than the 1986 French movie on which it's based, Three Men and a Cradle, which was a study of male egotism. Leonard Nimoy, who directed, isn't tough enough to resist the obvious, and the movie becomes so cute it stops being funny. There's one surprise, however. Tom Selleck, a bust in movies so far, shows an amiable flair for light comedy. Find this man a script and a co-star of the female sex.

NEW YORK POST, 11/25/87, p. 33, Roger Ebert

Three Men and a Baby begins with too many characters and too much plot, and 15 minutes into the film I was growing restless.

[.....] The movie never steps wrong as long as it focuses on the developing love between the big men and the tiny baby. At first they're baffled by this little bundle that only eats, sleeps, cries and makes poo-poo- lots and lots of poo-poo. "The book says to feed the baby every two hours," Selleck complains, "but do you count from when you start, or when you finish? It takes me two hours to get her to eat, and by the time she's done it's time to start again, so that I'm feeding her all of the time."

Those scenes are the heart of the movie. Unfortunately, there is also a completely unnecessary sub-plot that distracts from the good stuff. Three Men and a Baby is a faithful reworking of a French film from a few years ag [...]

Learning that an American remake of the French movie was being planned, I assumed that the drug angle would be the first thing written out of the script.

But, no, Nimoy and his writers, James Orr and Jim Cruickshank, have remade the entire French movie, drugs and all, leading to a badly staged and distracting confrontation between the heroes and the dealers at a midtown construction site.

Luckily, there's enough of the domestic comedy to make the movie work.

NEWSDAY, 11/25/87, Part II/p. 11, Joseph Gelmis

The original scenario has been altered very little in the remake, just minor changes in the plot and an infusion of idiomatic American one-liners.

"Mom," says Danson to his mother (Celeste Holm), "I'm a screwup."

"You were a screwup," says she. "Now you're a father."

The remake is, like the original, good for a few laughs and a few tugs at the heartstrings. But the judgment of my original review applies equally to the remake: "The sitcom farce they play is at odds with the sincerity of the emotions the story is meant to evoke."

Selleck Danson and Guttenberg made me chuckle more than their French counterparts. Not necessarily because they're funnier. But because it's funny to see familiar American bachelor icons from Magnum, P .I. and Cheers and countless movies become the love-slave of an infant who must be fed, diapered or entertained every waking moment.

Three Men and a Baby is fluff, but it's agreeable enough if you're in a kitchy-coo state of mind.

NEWSWEEK, 11/30/87, p. 73, David Ansen

[....] Unfortunately, most of the comedy rests on a series of untenable contrivances. For starters, we are asked to believe that three successful New Yorkers well past their college years-an architect (Selleck), an actor (Danson) and a cartoonist (Guttenberg) would be sharing a million-dollar penthouse apartment on Central Park West. Even more curious, these guys never bother to hire a nurse. The reason, of course, is simple: there'd be no comedy if they exhibited common sense. And why, you might ask, do they bring baby along on a dangerous mission to confront the gun-toting drug dealers whose package of heroin they have accidentally acquired? Again, the movie jettisons logic in pursuit of the cutes. And it backfires. All you can think of is that our heroes are acting like jerks. And the moviemakers can't even wring a good joke out of the situation.

These characters remain outlines, with only the personalities of the stars to fill them in. Here are three obviously competitive, career-oriented men confronting an outrageous, inconveniencing situation. A golden opportunity, you might think, for an edgy, farcical exploration of the macho mind under siege. But Nimoy and his writers prefer blandness to satire; an E.T. without toilet training, little Mary has been sent to earth to prove that even playboys have big hearts. A feel-good fantasy for baby boomers, Three Men and a Baby is so aggressively innocuous you may be ready for beddy-bye time long before it's over.

VILLAGE VOICE, 12/1/87, p. 82. Jan Hoffman

Here's a go-figure scenario for you: In the spring of 1986, France mails us Three Men and a Cradle, its highest grossing film in two decades, nominated here for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Three Men was a light, albeit thoughtful, reverie about three roommates, ultra-bachelors who ultimately succumb to their tender parenting instincts for an adorable infant dropped at their doorstep. The sauciness of this send-up was thoroughly French; its politics came from a bemused feminist-writer-director Coline Serreau.

Hey, whatever they can do, Hollywood can do better! Within less than a year of the film's release here, Americans remade it for a broader audience. They got two guys to write it, and cast two of the leads with TV actors. [....]

The American version sticks closely to the cluttered plot of the original. [...] Just about every important detail was lost in the translation. The Frenchmen were endearing rather than handsome, just average middle-class guys scrambling to make a living and keep their ramshackle digs women-proof and comfy. They were notch-men, sure, but director Serreau presented their amorality in caricature. When the baby enters their lives, she pisses in their faces.

The French version concentrates on showing how the men's lives change because of the baby; they adapt to her. A dinner party with hot-to-trot lovelies at their pad collapses when they neglect their dates to care for the wailing infant. They're snappish with exhaustion, become careless with their work. But the good-natured Americans are really never less than troopers; they figure out how to adapt the baby to their lives. When architect Selleck visits a construction site, he outfits her with a little pink hard hat.

The American version also has a nasty additional character who never would have been in Coline Serreau's film: the architect's chilly lawyer-girlfriend, who is not the slightest bit interested in the infant, and even derisive about child-rearing. Glenn Close meet Diane Keaton! What's next? Fatal Baby Attraction?