Three Men and a Baby (1987)

Take one super-cute infant, give her a lot of audience-grabbing close-ups, and surround her with a lighter-than-air story line.
Which featuring 2 softly fascinating older hunks from TV and one softly smarmy younger hunk.  Who'd never made it especially gigantic in the films. The result? 3 Men and a Baby, the top-grossing film of 1987. Seeing Selleck, Danson, and Guttenberg together in one flick was sort of like sitting to a course of mixed veggies composed of 3 sorts of mash. But in 3 Men and a Baby, the collective flavorlessness of the 3 stars essentially served a purpose. The film's one-joke eventuality swinging bachelors relinquish their overgrown-adolescent techniques and learn how to become caring daddies could play less as comedy than as a type of relaxing fantasy of tamed macho. Where the first film was about 3 Long Island bachelors learning to switch nappies, 3 Men and a little Woman is about 3 New York bachelors who have given up their liberty, their egos, and essentially their sex lives so as to commit themselves to raising a kid. Small Mary is now a five-year-old preschooler.

As played by Robin Weisman, she is wonderfully angelic one minute and wonderfully deceptive the next. . The film takes pains not to overplay her appeal ; unlike 3 Men and a Baby, it's conspicuously lacking in the crowd ''Awwwww!' ' factor. Mary's mother, the English stage actress Sylvia ( played by American actress Nancy Travis ), is now part of the household. Initially, the filmmakers appear stuck for a trick. Trying to defuse the fact the one-mommy-and-three- daddies arrangement appears well...a bit kinky, they luxuriate in much earnest hand-wringing about the characters ' ''needs.' ' for a bit, the flick plays like an unrighteous cross between Three's Company and thirtysomething. But this turns out to be an intricate set up.

Pete ( Selleck ), you see, has fallen crazy about Sylvia ; since he is the most naturally paternal of the 3 men, he also appears the legitimate father for Mary ( although her biological pop is Ted Danson's Jack yes, this gets confusing ).
When Pete proves too insecure to confess his feelings, Sylvia, who truly loves him too, scurries off to Britain with her director, a classy cad ( Christopher Cazenove ) who has guaranteed to wed her and become a devoted dad. Our heroes then follow them to the UK country, and the film turns into an enjoyably broad clash-of-cultures farce.

There's nothing much you have not seen until now :

Selleck drives on the incorrect side of the road, and the English characters are a collection of over-civilized lunatics.Yet director Emile Ardolino ( Filthy Dancing ) gives the farce routines a pleasant zest, and the performers carry the day. Selleck and Travis do nicely with their connect-the-dots love. There are a few things to this father-protector role that liberates Selleck. The 3 Men pictures could be the sole occasions ( at least in films ) when he has shaken the wood out of his acting. And Fiona Shaw has a little comic victory as the frumpy English boarding-school proprietess who keeps lusting after Selleck.

Building up to her twittery ten-dollar words as if they were surprisingly erotic, Shaw is not just bizarre, she is imperiously goony. It's performances like hers that aid in making 3 Men and a Small Woman for all its restrictions a far funnier flick than its precursor.