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To call the late Dennis Potter a brilliant scriptwriter understates his amazing accomplishments: He completely redefined television, opening up imaginative possibilities beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Potter's sometimes hallucinatory and always multileveled stories fluidly meshed fantasy and reality, and The Singing Detective is the richest and most profound of them all. This visually stylish six-part series focuses on the memories, writings, and feverish deliriums of noir novelist Philip Marlowe, played by the astonishing Michael Gambon. Suffering from the debilitating skin disease psoriasis (which plagued Potter himself) and stuck in a joyless hospital ward with a cast of strange characters, he loses himself in remembrances of his troubled boyhood and caustic marriage, as well as in an elaborate, highly cinematic detective tale starring himself as a singing P.I. As usual in Potter's work, characters lip-synch to popular songs from the '30s and '40s that comment ironically on the action. In addition to Gambon, Alison Steadman, Janet Suzman, Patrick Malahide, Bill Patterson, Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, and Imelda Staunton deliver fine performances in this absorbing, disturbing, and beautiful television drama. Karen Backstein

All Movie Guide

With the notable exception of Pennies From Heaven, The Singing Detective was the best-known TV miniseries project of the iconoclastic, darkly humored Dennis Potter. A reworking of Potter's first novel Hide and Seek, the six-part series starred Michael Gambon as crime novelist Philip E. Marlow. Suffering from a hellish skin-and-nerve disease called psoriatic arthroparthy (a painful infliction which ultimately killed the real-life Potter), Marlow was confined to a hospital bed, where under the influence of numerous prescription drugs he began to imagine himself as the hard-boiled hero of his latest detective novel. While trying to solve a difficult case, Marlow continually drifted backward in time to his childhood in the Forest of Dean, occasionally bursting into song to express his emotions. As fantasy and reality merged into one, Marlow was forced into a tortuous session of self-analysis and personal discovery. Virtually everyone in the cast was seen in double and triple roles, including nominal leading ladies Alison Steadman and Joanne Whalley (aka Joanne Whalley-Kilmer). The series earned two BAFTA awards (the British equivalent of the Emmys), one for Best Actor to Michael Gambon. After its initial BBC1 run from November 16, to December 21, 1986, The Singing Detective was shown in the United States via public and cable television, where it picked up another award, the prestigious Peabody, in 1989. Hal Erickson

Product Details

• UPC: 794051169921
• Source: BBC WARNER
• Subtitles: English
• Time: 7:30:00
• Sales Rank: 5,638

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