Is This Film Really Funny? - Not Exactly. SPOILERS

Not very funny for me.

This film was released in 1962, and in 1963 the Writers' Guild of Great Britain awarded it “Best British Comedy Screenplay” – which to me shows how lame British humour was in those days.

While the film does have some absurd characters and events it is not a deeply humorous film. Thus I am much more in agreement with Dennis Schwartz of “Ozus’ World Movie Reviews: “A cheerless farce with pretensions of being a kitchen sink drama.” Again, Time Out (New York) judged it as “this biting, rather sad farce”. The ‘Chicago Reader’ sees it as ‘a mixture of Ealing and the kitchen sink’.

The husband (John Lewis) has no intention of telling the truth when he says to his wife Jean that he and his would-be sexual partner Liz left the play early “because she wanted to talk about the Librarian’s job” , and he has every intention of meeting up with her again to continue their liaison.

Where is the humour in Jean’s reply?: “I know the look you get when you start fantasizing about a bit on the side. You do what you want but I don’t want to hear about it – don’t tell me. Go off and do it if you want to, as long as you don’t tell me [i.e., because any confession from you is worthless]. I don’t care what you get up to, just give me my housekeeping every week.”
The bitterness in this scene is palpably evident.

The real tone of the film is actually given in the title: “Only Two Can Play” – that is, Lewis eventually finds out that it is better to work on the relationship that he is in, rather than getting sandwiched in a threesome, with him being in the middle of two relationships at the one time.

The reviewer in the New York Times did say he found it a “side-splitter” but was more accurate in judging it to be “a travesty of “Room at the Top” – it was this latter film, made in 1959, that gives a truer tenor of the times and shows itself to be the much superior film.