The Whole Town's Talking

By RICHARD CORLISS

You earn $60 million in your first four weeks, and everybody has an explanation for your success. As the surprise movie hit of the fall season, Tri-Star's baby-love comedy Look Who's Talking has inspired plenty of retrospective wisdom. It came out at the right time of year, when its only competition was heavy dramas. It hits yuppie moviegoers where they live: in the narrow margin between careers and parenthood. It carries echoes of When Harry Met Sally in the loving friendship of a thirtysomething mom (Kirstie Alley) and the cabdriver (John Travolta) who moonlights as baby-sitter. It has Hollywood's favorite premise, the fish out of water -- or, here, fetus out of womb. For the main character is a talking baby, in the worldly wise-guy voice of TV and movie star Bruce Willis.

A month ago, though, few people were predicting a smash. The movie's star, Kirstie Alley of TV's Cheers, was an unproven marquee draw. Its male leads, Travolta and George Segal, were long past their luster. Critics mostly dumped on the picture or ignored it. Savants figured, in fact, that it had about as much chance of being a hit as, say, a single sperm has of fertilizing an egg.

They forgot about Mikey, the embryo (and then infant) with star quality. Sassy but never cynical, Mikey is first seen, through some cunningly simple special effects, as a kind of hot-rodding sperm cruising up the Fallopian tube to the tune of the Beach Boys' I Get Around. "The sperm comes on and people go crazy," says Jonathan Krane, the film's producer. "From then on they're laughing at the picture." Not quite. They're laughing with it, in the easy, conspiratorial laughter any domestic comedy would kill to get.

Moviegoers love babies, of course. A lame comedy like 3 Men and a Baby earned $168 million by offering little more than Tom Selleck diapering a child. The talking baby is another familiar Hollywood tradition; street-smart infants narrated the film The First Time (1952) and a 1960 sitcom called Happy. Spermatozoa have schmoozed (Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex), and in this year's Me and Him even a penis got chatty.

But writer-director Amy Heckerling, 35, had an adult agenda in mind. "It's not who do you want to sleep with; it's who can you depend on," she says. "Babies don't need fathers, but mothers do. Someone who is taking care of a baby needs to be taken care of. I was trying to deal with those issues. The talking baby was comic relief."

It has brought blessed relief to a few careers. For the Kansas-born Alley, "this is my big blockbuster. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I'm clicking my heels." Travolta, back on top after years of languishing, says the movie "makes people happy. It makes them feel good about having a family. Men tell me, 'You're giving me lessons in how to be a dad.' Women say, 'Will you be my husband?' I gotta tell you, it thrills me to pieces." It thrills Hollywood too. The town is always pleased to welcome a baby with such a humongous silver spoon.

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles