The Singing Detective (1986)

Sometimes impenetrable, often heartbreaking, The Singing Detective (1986) was one of the finest programs ever produced for television (the six-hour BBC miniseries was released theatrically in the United States). It and another British television miniseres, Pennies From Heaven (1978), are considered the masterworks of writer Dennis Potter, who brought his obsessions with the era of the 1930s and '40s to life in Brechtian style, creating characters tortured by their painful pasts and grim presents who often broke, paradoxically, into joyous singing and dancing to the catchy, sunny popular songs of the time. Michael Gambon, delivering a nuanced, acerbic performance, stars as the crime novel writer Philip E. Marlow, suffering from psoriasis so acute that he cannot lift a pen and is confined to a hospital where he nevertheless attempts to mentally work on a screenplay version of his most successful book, "The Singing Detective." Marlow is in such enormous pain, however, that his ruminations become hallucinogenic daydreams, blurring the line between his fictional story, his real-life childhood, his predilection for pop music of the Great Depression and World War II periods, and his hospital stay. The blending of these preoccupations leads to characters from his book wandering into his ward, and events from his novel ending up as memories from his past (or is the other way around?). Like most of Potter's work, The Singing Detective is semi-autobiographical (it is also a loose reworking of his first novel, 1973's Hide and Seek). Like Marlow, Potter suffered from acute psoriasis that left him occasionally isolated and unable to work, or to even lift a pen. It seems little coincidence, then, that Potter's fictional counterparts were often miserably confined in some way or secluded from society. Potter is never quite that easy to understand, though: his isolated heroes are also manifestations of the writer's recurring, larger theme of man bound by the decaying physical, but soaring in his mind and spirit, through song and dance, verbal badinage, or the imagination. Though the complexity of the story's elliptical structure and its alternately cynical and sentimental tone would have perplexed many directors, Jon Amiel mastered Potter's material, rendering a work of real depth and lack of pandering, something rarely found on any screen, large or small. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide