A look inside Hollywood and the movies. : PSST! NORMAN BATES WAS MOTHER : Please Don’t Give the ‘Game’ Away

About halfway through “The Crying Game,” about an IRA terrorist on the lam in London, audiences are hit with a bombshell--a kind of “huge, jaw-dropping surprise,” in the words of New Yorker magazine film critic Terrence Rafferty.

Of course, there’s a lot more than this one revelation in the film, as the raves that greeted its debut in Los Angeles and New York suggest. But the question is how to keep the surprise a secret?

To this end, “Game” producer Stephen Woolley, distributor Miramax Films and the publicity firm Dennis Davidson and Associates went to extra lengths in recent weeks to make sure that the media kept mum. Special apres -screening pleas were made by Woolley at the film’s various festival showings (Toronto, New York, Telluride) last September. Sealed envelopes were handed out at media screenings, with a note asking critics not to reveal the surprise. The vast majority cooperated, but there were a few half-leaks.

A little over a week ago, “Entertainment Tonight” producer David Newell confided to Miramax marketing VP Jerry Rich that he was thinking of running a piece that would have effectively spilled the beans. Rich talked Newell into holding off. “There’s a limit to how long the secret can stay a secret,” Newell explains. “We’ll probably hold on to the segment until late December, after the film breaks wide.”

But in the latest issue of Spin, critic Jonathan Bernstein half-reveals the surprise in his review. Reached at Spin’s New York office, Bernstein offers a chagrined mea culpa . “There’s no way I would have revealed the secret intentionally,” he claims. “I was told the film wouldn’t be out until late November, and for some reason the issue came out earlier than usual. It was my fault but it was a timing thing, really.”

Woolley says the only other leak came from the London Financial Times’ critic Nigel Andrews, whose review flat-out gave the game away. (To prepare his readers for the information, Andrews cautioned them by saying, “Those who don’t want to know the twist in this film, stop reading.”)

“I think that’s why the press has towed the line so unanimously, because they liked it so much,” Wolley says.

Newsweek’s David Ansen finessed it by writing, “It’s impossible to discuss the richness of Jordan’s masterfully constructed work without spoiling its deceptions and disguises.” Ansen’s sentence reads one way for those who’ve seen the movie and (hint, hint) another way for those who haven’t.