He may have been famous for Spock, but Nimoy was also an adept filmmaker – and this 1980s classic shows Hollywood trying to get to grips with feminism

While Leonard Nimoy’s obituaries will, of course, focus on Mr Spock, the late actor did more than put on pointy ears on movies. He was also an occasional director and his biggest success was also one of the biggest hits of the 1980s, the 1987 comedy Three Men and a Baby.

None of Nimoy’s previous directing efforts suggested that he had any greater understanding of comedy than Spock himself: there were two Star Trek films, of course, and occasional TV episodes of shows such as TJ Hooker. But with Three Men and a Baby, Nimoy proved himself to be an adept handler of mainstream 80s comedy, updating the far more farcical (and chauvinist) French original Trois Hommes et un Couffin into something more Hollywoodised and slick. But within the slickness, he let his three leads, Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg and Ted Danson shine through with their own individual charm, particularly so in the case of Selleck and Danson (Guttenberg, to be honest, is pretty much acted off screen by both of them, and Three Men and a Baby marked the beginning of the end for him.) For this reason, the film has aged remarkably well – about as well, in fact, as other big 80s Hollywood productions that succeeded on the strength of the charisma of their leading men, such as Beverly Hills Cop and Die Hard.

Not long after Three Men and a Baby was released, Susan Faludi cited it in her classic book Backlash as an example of Hollywood’s rebellion against feminism. In fact, in retrospect, it looks more like one of several awkward attempts by Hollywood to get to grips with feminism in the 80s. Along with John Hughes’ Uncle Buck, Three Men and a Baby shows men raising children, or, in this case, a child, and while at first the men’s lack of domesticity is the source of the comedy (the baby peed on their silk sheets! Hilarious!), Nimoy takes great pains to emphasise how much the men enjoy being parents – far more than the men in the French original do – and that they become good at it.

These scenes, and the inevitable music montage showing them playing with the baby in the park, the pool and at their workplaces, are cheesy as hell, but, thanks largely to Selleck and Danson, sweetly effective. They also underline how far Hollywood had come since John Hughes’ 1983 comedy Mr Mom in which a man looking after his children is depicted as tantamount to the end of world order.

The completely insane and superfluous action sideplot in the film (something about smuggling drugs, blah blah blah, don’t worry too much about it) is as nonsensical as action sideplots in comedies generally are. But Nimoy was pretty good at switching the tone in the film from comedy to action. He was clearly more comfortable with the former, but he made a decent enough fist of maintaining the tension during scenes that make next to no sense.

Nimoy never enjoyed a directorial success as great as Three Men and a Baby again. But he can at least claim innocence of the frankly execrable Three Men and a Little Lady (and he’s now definitely off the hook for the long mooted Three Men and a Bride.) But for this film alone, his directing career deserves a hat tip.