"The air was like an Eskimo's mother-in-law - cold and icy." - Michael Gambon as Philip Marlow
The Singing Detective DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
The 1986 BBC miniseries The Singing Detective is a brilliantly hypnotic masterpiece of human redemption presented as a pastiche of film noir, medical drama, and lush musical. Michael Gambon stars as Philip Marlow who, but for a letter, shares his name with Raymond Chandler's noir detective Philip Marlowe. Marlow is a writer of cheap detective novels, an occupation he feels was almost preordained by his given name. Hospitalized with debilitating psoriasis and arthritis, Marlow has essential given up on life, choosing instead to wallow in self-pity. Now unable to write, he finds an escape from the incessant boredom and pain through his imagination.
The miniseries takes place on several different planes - Marlow's re-imagining of his first novel (also called "The Singing Detective"), his remembrance of his unhappy childhood, his present reality in the hospital ward, and a place where all three meet.
Marlow imagines himself as the titular hero of "The Singing Detective," his murder mystery set in 1940s London. This version of Marlow is a hard boiled detective who, as a sideline, is also a suave nightclub singer with an orchestra. He is hired by Mark (Patrick Malahide) to solve the murder of a hooker (Kate McKenzie) who turned up dead after leaving his apartment. Also interested in the case are two mysterious men (Ron Cook & George Rossi) who constantly lurk in the shadows. These scenes manage to be deeply evocative of film noir conventions while affectionately spoofing them.
Marlow uses his "Singing Detective" musings as a way to cope with his painful reality. Covered from head to toe with a red, scaly rash, his hands twisted by arthritis, even the slightest movement is agony. The hospital ward does little to lift his spirits. Casually cruel Nurse White (Imelda Stuanton) refuses to give food or medicine to patients unless she hears a "please," even from those patients who cannot speak. The doctors are worse. As Marlow speaks passionately to a group of physicians about the physical and mental torture he suffers, they simply shift their weight from foot to foot, check their watches absentmindedly, and, once he has finished, blithely suggest that he take Valium. The only bright spot on the staff for Marlow is Nurse Mills, played by an impossibly young Joanne Whalley.
Marlow remains mostly aloof from the other patients in the ward, including prim fussbudget Mr. Hall (David Ryall), dim hood Reginald Dimps (Gerard Horan), and severely palsied Noddy (Leslie French). He grudgingly tries to form relationships with the patients who successively occupy the bed next to him, Pakistani Ali (Badi Uzzaman) and mean Mr. Adams (Charles Simon), if only because he cannot light his own cigarettes. The hospital scenes could easily have been maudlin, but humor is instead found in even the most serious moments.
Although deeply skeptical of him at first, Marlow comes to respect hospital psychiatrist Dr. Gibbon (Traffik's Bill Paterson). With his help, Marlow examines the formative years of his childhood, years that held a different kind of pain. We meet his simple, loving father (Jim Carter) who had a talent for singing, his high-strung, piano playing mother (Alison Steadman) who constantly reached for a happiness just beyond her grasp, and his cruel, manipulative grade school teacher (Janet Henfrey) who affected the young Marlow in ways that his older self can barely realize. Marlow's love for music, passed along to him by his parents, comes through in the musical numbers he sometimes imagines.
As all of this swims around in Marlow's head, he is visited by his estranged wife, Nicola (Janet Suzman), who brings news of a film production company's interest in buying the screen rights to "The Singing Detective." While this should be good news, it simply fuels Marlow's paranoia and mistrust. Surely Nicola is plotting something - her love and respect cannot simply be taken at face value by Marlow. His imagination runs away with him as he envisions her elaborate scheme to steal the film rights.
At heart, The Singing Detective is not a hospital drama or a detective story. As a matter of fact, the mystery portion of the series is not even solved. Instead, the focus here is on the realization of how individual events in our past affect our present selves. Only by facing his past can Marlow make the necessary changes in his life that can finally lead to happiness. Only by remembering, for example, his youthful decision to "Doesn't give thy love. Hide in theeself, else they'll die. They'll die and they'll hurt you" and working through the traumas that led to that decision can he disavow it and begin to live again.
The Singing Detective is written by Dennis Potter. His writing is simultaneously simple and complex, as he is a master of using the conventions of television to draw realistic, fully formed characters. A perfect example is a scene in which Marlow and Dr. Gibbon perform a word association exercise. This is by no means a new device, but this three minute exchange of call and response adds much to our understanding of Marlow and his way of thinking.
Like Marlow, Potter himself suffered from psoriatic arthritis and shared several other key biographical details. Potter, who died of cancer in the mid 1990s, claimed in multiple interviews that The Singing Detective was not autobiographical, that any similarities between himself and his work were simply due to shear laziness. He apparently told a different story to those people involved in the production, as is evident in both the commentary and extras included with this set. In his commentary, director Jon Amiel relates that after the first read through with the cast, Potter was left speechless. When he regained his composure, he told Amiel "Christ, I never realized it was so close to the bloody bone."
Jon Amiel also deserves special credit for The Singing Detective's hypnotic and visually stunning style. He brings a sense of haunting beauty to every frame of the miniseries, and some of the images become indelibly etched on the viewer's brain.
