[Copyright Cedric Pulford, 2007. This article may not be reprinted or distributed other than for individual and personal use, either electronically or on hard copy, without permission from the publisher]

Critics who give away too much about a film, a play or a book are a danger for their readers, whose enjoyment is spoilt. CEDRIC PULFORD takes up arms against what seems to be a growing bad practice

WHEN a lonely widow hires a gay dancing instructor, in the play Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, you “know just what will happen next”, according to leading critic Charles Spencer.

“First they will quarrel, then they will become best friends, then they will share secret sorrows and lame jokes until one of them admits to having a fatal illness. And so it proves…”

Well, if you hadn’t guessed it you sure as heck know now. The only remaining question is, Why bother to see the play?

Spencer is far from alone as London critics seem to stand in line to give away too much of the story and so spoil the fun of those who look to reviews for guidance on whether to see the play, watch the film, read the book.

Anthony Minghella’s 2006 film Breaking and Entering concerns an architect, Will, whose office is burgled by a young intruder. David Gritten takes up the tale: “The boy is revealed as Miro, a Bosnian refugee whose mother Amira ekes out a living as a seamstress. Will befriends Amira to confirm Miro’s guilt, but just as he instigates a romance, she discovers his duplicity and turns the tables on him.”

Thanks, but I might have enjoyed finding that out as the film went along. At least I don’t know exactly how it came out. No such luck for those watching the remake of The Italian Job, whose original famously ended with the gang in a bus balanced precariously over a cliff.

Rebecca Feiner, another of those all-knowing if world-weary critics, told her readers: “I had guessed that the cliff-hanger ending of 35 years ago would be dumped. What I didn’t expect is that it would be swapped wholesale for a TV epilogue-style conclusion of grinding sentimentality as [Mark] Wahlberg and [Charlize] Theron float away in a Venetian gondola.”

Nick Roddick lays bare much of the sex film Battle of Heaven, whose protagonist, a chauffeur called Marcos, commits a child kidnap, then “consolidates the damage with another, equally shocking act of violence before joining a pilgrimage and ending up dead in a basilica.”

Nick Curtis is even more effective at spoiling the fun with David Edgar’s 2005 play, Playing With Fire. It is about political apparatchik Alex’s efforts to bring Northern dinosaurs into the New Labour fold. “At the end, Alex forsakes politics, apparently to lead a multiracial dance-fitness class, the only place she feels she can make a difference.”

Even with a slight piece, ignorance is bliss. Jeff Schaffer’s Eurotrip “doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a stupid teen-formula movie”. How does critic Sukhdev Sandhu know that, by the way? Has Schaffer sent out a press release announcing: “Thi s is a stupid teen-formula movie”?

The film describes four American college kids’ romp through Europe. Slight or not, I could have done without knowing that “in Rome one of them ends up becoming Pope”.

Few would accuse author P.D. James of being slight. In The Lighthouse, according to Rachel Simhon, hero Adam Dalgliesh not only develops a “potentially fatal illness” but also “at the end of the novel, he has made the life-changing decision he has been shying away from for years”.

The case for not giving away too much of new work is clearcut. The issue is harder with old work revived. After all, somebody somewhere doesn’t know that the lovers die at the end of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Yet this is hardly an argument for critics not discussing the double tragedy when writing about a new production.

What of work that is old but not all-but-universally known? The Women is a 1939 film with a stellar cast including Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell and Paulette Goddard. Previewing the picture for television, Yvette Huddleston told us: “Although hardly a feminist film – there is no sisterhood here, and Mary goes back to her faithless husband in the end – it is a gloriously sharp and intelligent celebration of womanhood.”

A dilemma of how much to tell.

There is a dilemma in arts criticism between grounding comments in examples and not giving away too much of the plot or the ending.

There is a dilemma, to be sure, but it is depressing that many critics don’t seem to recognise it.

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