3 Men And A Cradle

3 Men And A Cradle

I had known that the French film industry was in a bad shape, but I never imagined how bad it was until I watched “3 Men and a Cradle,” winner of the 1985 French Academy Award, which is just so annoying that I wanted to yell against all the idiocy on the screen. No one with even an ounce of an understanding of people will find this movie believable for a moment. It’s all formula from start to finish.

The film shows three friends who live in a fancy Paris apartment where every day is like New Year’s Eve. Out of them, one who works as an air hostess flies off to the Far East telling his flat-mates that he expects a drop off.

The following day they are given a basket with a baby girl inside.

A note states that this is their friend’s illegitimate child. After some dumb honks and squeaks of disapproval, both bachelors decide to nurse her by getting lots and lots of poo (their word) dumped all over themselves while they change her nappies; then there are visits to see a chemist about baby milk formulas; and finally she continuously cries at night depriving bachelors’ sex lives etc.

But here is the problem: The real baby was not what his fellow steward expected would be dropped off. He meant heroin consignment instead. A gang comes along to get back their wayward drugs; subsequently cops intervene; and heroin is placed inside infant’s diapers first place any smart narc would search.

In this movie, though heroin is known as mean and evil drug, it appears only because simply plot demands it. That testifies how brainless are its storylines; almost any other illegal stuff would have been less shocking for viewers than smuggled substances like these. Meanwhile we discover that child’s mother has gone Stateside for six months. Instead she had left her baby with neither ringing bell nor a note on the doorstep then she does not contact for half a year till he is being examined by her. That talks about how feeble minded she is.

Some scenes from this movie defy common sense.

Let’s take, for example, when an airline steward returns to his apartment and finds his roommates holding a baby and making sarcastic references to his “package,” but we have to listen to an endless line of dialogue that makes no sense before the steward suddenly realizes that the baby and the package are one and the same.

Of course, we know what will happen at the end of this film. The men will fall in love with the child. The mother will come back. She will reclaim her baby. The men will miss her. There will be some emotional reunion where it turns out that these three drug dealing airheads are actually softies after all. I guess they all live happily ever after those three guys plus mother and child?

I loathed every moment of this movie because it was so blind to psychology and reality, and so willing to settle for every relentless cliche and dim-witted, knee-jerk emotional response in the book. The only signs of life in the movie are given by the two little actresses who play the baby.

And now here comes the really bad news. Incredibly, Walt Disney Studios has acquired rights to make an American version of this film. That raises two questions: Why is it considered worth remaking? Why buy the rights when “3 Men and a Cradle” has been ripped off lock, stock and barrel from John Ford’s western classic “Three Godfathers,” a 1948 masterpiece about outlaw characters John Wayne, Harry Carey Jr., and Pedro Armendariz finding an abandoned infant in the desert while trying to take care of it? By itself, the sight of Wayne lubing up the little boy with wagon grease is more valuable than all one hundred miles of this awful French rehash. If you’re going to remake a movie at least redo it properly rather than copycatting.

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