Proposition 3 : Why Do So Many Films Feature Trios?

More movie titles start with the number three than any other cardinal number. Who knows why. Maybe it’s considered lucky. Whatever the reason, there are more than 120 films with titles that begin with three, and about half of them are available for home viewing.

That’s not counting the more than 30 volumes of The Three Stooges on “CA/Columbia tapes (more than 100 comedy shorts featuring Larry, Moe and Curly) and almost six hours available on three laser video discs.

“The Three Stooges” is an acquired taste, but once acquired impossible to saturate. The earliest comedies are by far the best: The comedy was fresher, the plots less hokey. Go for the early volumes and if they appeal to you, watch out, they can become an addiction.

The numeral three encompasses almost every genre, from children’s films to comedies to dramas and adventures.

Three Men and a Baby (1987, 102 minutes, Touchstone tape ad disc) and Three Fugitives (1989, 96 minutes, Touchstone tape and disc) are the latest comedies on video featuring the number three. Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg and Ted Danson are the amusing trio of swinging bachelor roommates who become instant fathers when they become caretakers of an infant.

The three in “Three Fugitives” are Nick Nolte, Martin Short and an adorable little girl named Sarah Rowland Doroff. Like “Three Men and a Baby,” “Three Fugitives” was an inferior remake of a French original even though Francis Veber remade his own film “Les Fugitifs.”

Fifty years earlier there was Three Broadway Girls (1932, 80 minutes, Cable tape, Kansas City, Mo., 913-362-2804). For some reason the film also was released under the name “The Greeks Had a Word for Them.” No matter what it is called, it’s a marvelous 1930s comedy of three gold-digging girls looking for husbands. Joan Blondell, Ina Claire and Madge Evans make up a terrific threesome. If the plot sounds familiar, it was remade in 1953 with Marilyn Monroe, Betty Grable and Lauren Bacall (“How to Marry a Millionaire”). Funny, but not as funny.

The Three Musketeers, the well-known Alexander Dumas story, has been brought to the screen on a regular basis. A silent version in 1916 is available with an organ score intact (74 minutes, Video Yesterday). The 1939 musical version with Don Ameche and the Ritz Brothers isn’t available yet (look for it on TV because it is very funny), but the lavish 1948 MGM production with Lana Turner as the seductive Lady DeWinter is gorgeous to look at (MGM/UA tape and laser disc). It features a dashing Gene Kelly as the fourth musketeer.

Perhaps the best adaptation yet on film is Richard Lester’s tongue-in-cheek version, which deftly mixes the expected swashbuckling adventure with coarse slapstick. Michael York, Richard Chamberlain, Frank Finlay and Oliver Reed are wonderful as the musketeers, Raquel Welch ravishing, and Christopher Lee and Charlton Heston marvelous villains in this lavish production filmed simultaneously with its sequel The Four Musketeers (1975, 105 minutes, USA tape). There is also an animated version of the story on Worldvision tape.

Three Days of the Condor (1975, 118 minutes, Paramount tape and disc) is a good suspense story representative of the paranoia gripping the nation following the assassination of President Kennedy. Robert Redford, a reader for a U.S. intelligence office, leaves for an errand to find everyone murdered when he returns. He soon finds himself a hunted man. Faye Dunaway is the innocent woman who takes him in. Well-crafted performances in another Sydney Pollack-Redford collaboration.

Three Faces West (1940, 79 minutes, Republic tape and disc) features John Wayne in an odd adventure-drama in which a group of Austrian refugees head for Oregon under Wayne’s guidance. The villains are Nazis, and Nazis on the range make for very strange bedfellows.

The Three Amigos (1986, 105 minutes, HBO tape and disc) should have been hilarious with Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Martin Short as three silent Western heroes summoned by a young Mexican woman who believes what she sees on the screen. The Randy Newman score and energetic performances by the three stars help, but with the exception of one hilarious takeoff on campfire songs, most of the jokes fizzle.

Far superior is The Three Caballeros (1945, 71 minutes, Walt Disney tape and laser standard play video disc) in which Donald Duck, Jose Carioca and Panchito offer the original three amigo roles. The Disney cartoon sequences are expectedly brilliant with stunning visuals added to south-of-the-border music.

The Three Lives of Thomasina (1963, 95 minutes, Walt Disney tape) is a typical Disney live-action film, this one set in England. The Paul Gallico story holds up well as the daughter of a mean-spirited veterinarian saves her pet cat with the help of a mystical woman with life-giving powers. Amusing family entertainment.

Home video companies should get busy. There are another 60 or so films with the numeral 3 in their title waiting in the vaults.