Game Night

Rattle of a Simple Man. "Have ye got a dartboard?" asks the scoutmaster from Manchester. There are no tiddlywinks at hand, and the London prostitute with whom he is spending the night to win a -L-50 bet on his virility has grown weary of ticktacktoe. "You're not oldfashioned, darling," she coos at last. "You're unbelievable."

Actually, Percy (Harry H. Corbett) seems entirely believable as a Lancashire bloke of almost invincible rectitude. For 39 years he has been a virgin, and that is the crux of this lacklusty comedy adapted from a London and Broadway play. The boob and the bawd (Diane Cilento, the gamekeeper's daughter of Tom Jones) meet, maunder, tell one another pathetic little lies, and slowly uncover their loneliness.

Expanded to fill the screen, such theatrical twosomes are more often swallowed by it, and Simple Man is no exception. Actress Cilento, strikingly miscast, has the style and quality for a more respectable trade. Worse still, added scenes and nonessential characters only give the viewers time to think dark thoughts, and in the duller stretches, some may wonder whether the to-bed-or-not-to-bed urgency that besets a working-class lout is really much different from the decision that Doris Day has faced so often and so bravely.

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