Michael Buckley, FILMS IN REVIEW, 8-9/86.

3 Men and a Cradle won Cesars (the French Oscars) for Best Film, Screenplay and Supporting Actor. It was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Foreign Film. To date, it's the most financially successful film to play France and its writer-director, Coline Serreau, has been signed by Disney to make an American version. The actors are good and the babies (two were used-one six months old, the other a year) adorable; but it's nothing new and seldom amusing. The scene where a cop is being read the riot act but the sound heard is a typewriter in use (complete with well-timed bell) is based on Jerry Lewis shtick-which is something else the French find funnier than audiences on this side of the ocean.

Sheila Benson, L.A. Times. 5/9/86

[.......] "3 Men and a Cradle" is a perfectly pleasant little piffle [.......] This picture won't rot your brain or lead your children into nasty habits. It's just French pablum. [.........] Absolutely nothing about it is unpredictable.

[......]

To make her point about the humanizing effect of life around a baby, Serreau has created a trio of buddies in their 30s and 40s, unmarried, unattached and untouched by anything more than one-night stands. That's pretty eerie right there. What's even more unreal is that once their nurturing instincts are tapped, they become more motherly than their own mothers (Jacques, a little soused, even tries, with a pillow, for the pregnant look), but no more open to serious relationships with women - only with babies; with one another, buddy-buddy fashion, or with a grown woman acting like something out of "Babs Doll . "

As the French say, bizarre.

Jill Forbes, Film Monthly Bulletin, 6/87

3 Men and a Cradle is an astute reading of contemporary mores-uncritical,

perhaps, but accurate. Alas, there is worse to come. Why three men? On the one hand, to confirm the protagonists' virile heterosexuality (two men might be suspect) and to minimize the risk that child care might feminize them. On the other because, as early exchanges emphasize, they are tied by a bond of brotherhood against the female world. They are the three musketeers of sexual adventure and, like Dumas' legendary heroes, each embodies an aspect of maleness which complements the others, together making up

'total man'.

[.......]

Then there is Sylvia, but what is she? A real mother, but a bad one who abdicates her responsibilities and cedes her ground until the end of the film when, like her daughter, she is admitted into the men's space only on condition that she is infantilised (the film ends with a shot of Sylvia curled up asleep in her daughter's cradle sucking her thumb).

David Ansen, Newsweek, 5/26/86

Serreau's real problem is her inability to tell a joke. Unless you find the mere idea of a man changing a diaper automatically hilarious, Three Men and a Cradle has precious few laughs. Shot in a strangely grave, twilight style ill suited to the sitcom premise, the movie plods dully from one foreseeable irony to the next. Yes, little Marie is adorable, but can one cute kid be responsible for an entire nation losing its esthetic marbles? C'est un grand mystère.

Vincent Canby, The New York Times, April 16, 1986

After all Three Men and a Cradle is neither a Bob Hope movie out of the 1940's nor an early sitcom of the 1950's. It comes to us from France the civilization that gave us Molire, Scribe, Corneille, Racine and Feydeau, not to mention the bikini, the croissant and le drugstore.

[....]

Three Men and a Cradle which opens today at the 68th Street Playhouse, is almost totally charmless. It's funny in the way of someone who in attempting to explain a joke, thoroughly destroys the humor, which, I assume, is mostly the fault of Coline Serreau, who wrote and directed it.

[......]

Miss Serreau approaches her material with the intensity of someone writing a thesis on farce - and with absolutely no gift for building gags, in unexpected ways, to any kind of boff climaxes. The jokes, which involve not only the baby but also a package of dope with which the baby is somehow confused, are laid out in obligatory fashion, linearly, as if they were exhibits in a glass case.