Touchstone Plus-Or-Minus: Three Fugitives

At some point in the 1980s, Hollywood decided the French were funny. All of a sudden, there was a mini-wave of French comedies being remade in the US. Touchstone wasn’t the first studio to start constructing this particular bandwagon but they may have perfected it with the twin successes of Down And Out In Beverly Hills and Three Men And A Baby. So, it should come as no surprise that Disney was eager to replicate those hits, especially once Three Men And A Baby became a runaway blockbuster. They never really did but that didn’t stop them from trying over and over again.

At the time, one of the biggest names in French comedy was writer-director Francis Veber. Several films he’d either written, directed or both had already been Americanized. The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe had begat The Man With One Red Shoe starring Tom Hanks. Le Jouet had become The Toy with Richard Pryor. L’emmerdeur (or, as it had been titled in the US, A Pain In The Ass) provided the basis for Billy Wilder’s final film, Buddy Buddy, starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. He was perhaps best known for cowriting La Cage Aux Folles, a massive international success that was itself eventually remade as Mike Nichols’s The Birdcage with Robin Williams and Nathan Lane.

Jeffrey Katzenberg met Francis Veber at the Cannes Film Festival and was eager to do business with him. Veber was about to start shooting his latest project, Les Fugitifs, with Gérard Depardieu and Pierre Richard. After hearing the story, Katzenberg immediately told Veber he wanted to make an English-language remake with him. Veber agreed, making Three Fugitives one of the few remakes to be commissioned before the original had even been released.