Singing Detective

The play's the thing....
THE SINGING DETECTIVE is a compelling, funny, and heart wrenching mystery starring Michael Gambon as Phillip Marlowe: writer, protagonist, and hospital patient. Patrick Malahyde (Middlemarch) flawlessly plays Marlowe's nemesis (nemeses)-three different characters with three different British accents. The cast also includes Janet Suzman as wife, lover and vamp; Alison Steadman (Mrs. Bennet in the recent production of `Pride and Prejudice') as wife, mother, lover, and vamp (Marlene Dietrich lookalike), Joanne Whalley (ex-Kilmer) as nurse, etc.; and the housekeeper from the BBC television series `As Time Goes By' as the school teacher from your worst nightmare.

In addition to the superb cast and wonderful settings filled with vintage WWII elements, one can watch `The Singing Detective' for the pure entertainment provided by a convoluted plot, quirky characters, musical segments, and many humourous moments. One of my favorite scenes occurs when Marlowe responds to the ministrations...

Absolutely brilliant
Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective is, quite simply, the greatest
work in film or television ever. Every scene is fascinating in its
own right, and as you see more of the series earlier moments take on
new significances as it is learned how they relate to the series as a
whole. The Singing Detective deals with a hospital-bound mystery
writer who is suffering from a crippling skin disease. In addition to
the often horribly funny scenes involving his current plight, we see
flashbacks of his childhood, fantasies about his estranged wife, and
episodes from one of his novels. The stories all gradually start to
connect with each other.... Potter constantly alters chronology, and
yet does so in such a masterful way that everything always makes
sense. And oh yes, there are musical numbers. Many aspects of this
series have been appropriated by later films such as Pulp Fiction
(with its time-shuffling) and Dancer in the...

An Absolutely Brilliant Adaptation Of Potter's Screenplay!
I'm hesitant to call this a musical, though that's precisely what it is. Dennis Potter wrote several musicals over the years, using different eras of music. This one is, by far, the best! The music here is from the 1940s. The drama, however, is actually a contemporary one. A (failed?) mystery writer named Philip Marlowe is hospitalized with a severe case of psoriasis...more corrrectly, psoriatic arthropathy (which Potter also suffered from). He has this one great novel in his past, though..."The Singing Detective." Marlowe's illness is terribly severe, and throughout the film we join his delirium as he relives events from his childhood, falls into a fascinating fantasy based on his novel, and comes back (from time to time) to the events currently happening in the hospital. These three streams are brilliantly intertwined, and the resulting story is absolutely THE BEST THING *EVER* TO HIT TELEVISION! This is *not* hype or exaggeration! The other reviewers are...

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