Word: guttenberg
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Answer: until 3 Men and a Baby began gathering its December momentum. Here was an amiable, air-headed fable about baby love. Its male leads were two TV stars, Tom Selleck and Ted Danson, who had never seemed big enough for the big screen and a third, Steve Guttenberg, best known for fronting the Police Academy farces. The story -- of three roguish bachelors forced to care for an abandoned infant -- cradled few surprises and, for great barren stretches, got lost in a draggy drug plot. The film's direction had all the comic subtlety one would expect from that Merlin...
...Bedroom Window is like a bus ride through Wonderland. The direction is bumpy, but the plot, from Anne Holden's novel The Witnesses, is reverberant in twists and implications. Terry Lambert (Steve Guttenberg) is having an affair with his boss's wife Sylvia (Isabelle Huppert). Through her lover's window she sees a punk (Brad Greenquist) attack a young woman, Denise (Elizabeth McGovern). To protect Sylvia, Terry tells the police he witnessed the assault. But the road to jail is paved with good intentions. Soon Terry is a fugitive, and both Sylvia and Denise are prey to a wily killer...
Classic Hitchcock in skeletal form: the setting of Rear Window; the mama's-boy murderer from Strangers on a Train; and even a fashionable switch of identities from Vertigo and Marnie. There are other rewards in this low- rent thriller. Guttenberg is no one's nominee for an '80s Cary Grant, but his frat-boy smile freezes nicely when he realizes he is suspected of murder. Until she must act the trollop to entice the killer, McGovern makes for an agreeably matter-of-fact heroine. If only there were a little sleek skin on the bones of this plot...
...like Short Circuit. If, on the other hand, your taste in robots runs toward the apolitical comedy of Artoo Detoo, then Director John Badham's efficient realization of a script by S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock may strike you as entirely too preachy keen. Ally Sheedy and Steve Guttenberg are the lovers matched by the machine; Austin Pendleton and Fisher Stevens are funny as, respectively, an ambiguous enemy and the malaprop-prone friend of what is finally just a pretty good special effect...
...gravity? As it happens, Cocoon has many familiar elements: it could be called E.T. Meets the Over-the-Hill Gang, or On Golden Pod. Like last Christmas' Starman, it contains a love story ^ between an extraterrestrial (Tahnee Welch, Raquel's lithe and stunning daughter) and a young American (Steve Guttenberg); here sex is represented as a love-light that ricochets around the swimming pool. Like E.T. and a dozen other fantasy films, it boasts gorgeous, if insubstantial special effects from George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic studio. And there is just enough locker-room humor to keep the gross-out brigade...