England,
1986, 6x75 min
Shown in 1987
CREDITS
- dir
-
Jon Amiel
- prod
-
John Harris, Kenith Trodd
- scr
-
Dennis Potter
- cast
-
Michael Gambon, Janet Suzman, Patrick Malahide
- source
-
BBC-TV
- gga award
-
Best of Category, Television: Drama
- premiere
-
U.S. Premiere
OTHER
An astonishingly rich and effective mixture of film noir, musical comedy, hospital drama, period piece, psycho-fantasy, sex farce and multi-layered character portrayal. The main character is a pulp-fiction writer named Philip Marlow who—lying in a hospital, nearly paralyzed by severe psoriasis—mulls over memories that haunt him while mentally rewriting his World War II-era crime novel, The Singing Detective. The excellent Michael Gambon plays the ailing writer, as well as the title role in the intermittent episodes of the detective story, but the film is chock full of characters from Marlow’s past, from his imagination and from the present—with all three dimensions sometimes getting scrambled in a dark-humored mix of zany hallucination and music-fueled nostalgia. Who done it? The answer comes in multiple form, but the process of getting there is uncommonly rewarding. This monumental British television serial, six episodes in all, was written by Dennis Potter, who created the original Pennies from Heaven for BBC.
—Peter Hogue
FACTOID #343
Director Sally Potter was the first person to be honored with the Festival’s Satyajit Ray Award. In 1993 she was interviewed onstage and her new film Orlando was screened. In 2005, she turned the tables by interviewing Peter J. Owens Award recipient Joan Allen.
