"The Singing Detective" tells the story of a crime writer (called Philip Marlow in the original and Dan Dark in Keith Gordon's film) who is hospitalized with a mysterious skin disease. As his memory and imagination run wild, the reality of the hospital merges with plot of his books, feverish, paranoid delusions, bitter childhood memories, and musical numbers.
The original series is a terrific blend of psychological drama, pulp crime yarn, and absurdist musical, shot through with the biting wit of playwright Dennis Potter's dialogue, and delivered by the masterful Michael Gambon, all woven into an elegant narrative. "The Singing Detective" broke new ground, and I consider it among the best six hours of TV I have ever seen, a true triumph of the form.
In remaking this seminal achievement as a movie, the story was transplanted to America and the script was mutilated almost beyond recognition. There is too much screen to fill, and not enough time to tell the story properly. Perfectly sized for TV, "The Singing Detective" did not survive the move to film.
The concrete sense of time and place that grounded the original falls apart in choppy flashbacks. Keith Gordon gives us none of the elegant layering of sound and image that made the transitions of the TV series so smooth. Not only was the postmodern layering of memories, fantasies, and reality more of a novelty in 1986, Jon Amiel also handled it much more gracefully. The scenes in Philip's past, some of the most haunting of the series, have been moved from London to Los Angeles and lost all depth -- they are now simplistic explanations for Dan's mental state.
Somebody (perhaps producer Mel Gibson) decided to cast Mel Gibson as the doctor. Why? Were there not enough middle-aged actors around who could have played a shrink without a fake hairpiece?
