Plot
Architect Peter Mitchell (Tom Selleck), cartoonist Michael Kellam (Steve Guttenberg) and actor Jack Holden (Ted Danson) are happy living their lives as bachelors in their lofty New York City apartment. Their lives are disrupted when a baby arrives on their doorstep one day. A note with the child, Mary, indicates that it is Jack's, the result of an affair with a recent co-star. The baby arrives in Jack's absence – he is in Turkey shooting a B movie, leaving Peter and Michael to fend for themselves in taking care of the child, something in which their lack of experience befuddles them.
At one point, Peter and Michael are mistakenly led to believe that they are to deliver Mary to two men who arrive at their door asking for "the package". They discover moments before their departure that the men are drug dealers who were actually seeking a package of heroin. They retrieve the infant, leaving the men with a can of powdered milk.
What results is a major change to the men's lives as they try to adjust to surrogate fatherhood—balancing the demands of work and the rearing of a child. Soon their paternal instincts take hold, and they grow attached to the child. Eventually, when Jack returns, Peter and Michael do not hesitate in taking their revenge and passing all responsibility of looking after Mary to Jack, but Jack quickly grows to love his daughter.
The drug dealers, demanding payment, eventually ransack the men's apartment looking for their drugs. The men formulate a plan to trap the dealers when they negotiate a deal to deliver the illicit goods. With a recording of the conversation, the men prove their innocence to the police and the dealers are arrested.
The three men then fully embrace their new role as Mary's guardians, however one day the baby's mother, an English woman named Sylvia (Nancy Travis), arrives, asking for Mary back intending to take her to England to live with her family. Handing her over, the three quickly find themselves miserable and desperately missing Mary. Deciding to stop Sylvia and Mary from leaving, they rush to the airport to try and persuade Sylvia to stay however they arrive just as her plane leaves. Defeated, the men return to their apartment, where they find both Sylvia and Mary. Sylvia explains she doesn't want to give up her career but can't do this if she has to raise Mary alone, so Peter quickly invites her and Mary to move into their apartment with them with Jack and Michael's agreement, and she agrees.
Read more about this topic: Three Men And A Baby
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“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)