Dennis Potter was a very innovative director, particularly noted for the way he incorporated music into his productions. What he does is use actual recordings and have the performers lip sync the lyrics. This is not unusual except in Potter's case he doesn't do it as you normally would, i.e. girl singing for a girl, but will have men singing women's parts, etc. This is very disconcerting when you first see and hear it, but like many things it grows on you as you adjust to it.
He had three big television mini series using this concept. The first of these was "Pennies From Heaven," which was a seven hour special on Masterpiece Theatre a number of years ago, and was set to the depression era music of the thirties. The Second Masterpiece Theatre production was "The Singing Detective," which used music popular during the war years. The third one is less well known, a four hour show called "Lipstick on Your Collar," which was set in the post World War II era and used the music of that period, i.e. The Platters, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, etc.
In the "Singing Detective," which many consider to be Potter's finest work of this type, he tells three separate stories and they bounce around between segments and not in a clear and easy sequence to follow. The mini series starts in a hospital where Michael Gambon, in the lead role is hospitalized with a very debilitating skin allergy problem. He plays a man named Philip Marlowe, note the name, who writes detective fiction. During the run of the six hour production he mentally reworks one of his earlier crime novel's, "the Singing Detective," trying out different story ideas. This becomes the films second theme. In these imaginary scenes he becomes the detective he is writing about. He's called the Singing Detective because he does sing with a small group in a nightclub and at the same time is trying to solve a crime. There is a third segment as well that deals with Marlowe the writer when he was a child. The three parts, the hospitalization of Marlowe, the rewriting of his novel "The Singing Detective," and his life as a child are intermixed. Each has a particular theme. During the segment of Marlowe as a child you gradually become aware of major effects on his life at that time, the infidelity of his mother and his great love for his father and the latter of Philip.
Only one person figures in both the dream and fantasy sequences, Gambon, playing the hospital patient and the detective story novelist the Singing Detective. One other person figures in these two sequences, that is the English actor Patrick Malahyde, who plays a villain in both the childhood and fantasy segments.
Joanne Whalley and Imelda Staunton, Academy Award winner for best actress a couple of years ago, play nurses at the hospital. Bill Patterson plays the Hospital psychiatrist who is examining Marlowe's allergy as perhaps a product of psychological problems. This is partly confirmed because Marlowe the patient seems to be continually hallucinating. In one hospital segment he is pursued by a couple of the fictional characters from the rewrite he is working on.
In the youth portions, Marlowe's mother is played by Alison Steadman. Janet Suzman plays Marlow's wife, who he strongly dislikes. You may not know some of these performers, but you will recognize them if you have been a regular follower of Masterpiece Theatre on PBS.
A possible way to describe this whole long six hour TV series is "The Several Veils of the Singing Detective" in a take off on the Seven Veils of Salome and of the film made in the late 1940's starring James Mason and Ann Todd that was called "The Seventh Veil." In the latter film Todd plays a concert pianist and Mason is her guardian. The film starts with her throwing herself into the Thames in an attempt to drown herself. She is rescued and her life probed by a psychiatrist played by Leo Genn trying to isolate what is causing her bizarre behavior. In this process he gradually strips the veils that she had created around herself mentally to avoid something from her background.
As an example, the lip sync from the film version of "Pennies from Heaven, as performed by "Bernadette Peters, Steve Martin and Tess Harper to a Boswell Sisters recording might not be satisfying to many film enthusiasts as should be expected, however the cleverness of the writing and the interesting stories should be a stimulus. Ultimately, "The Singing Detective" is the hardest Potter production to follow, but if the viewer is willing to put in the time to analyze what he or she has seen they will be well rewarded.
Dick Gardner, Classic Films
Read the 25th Anniversary Edition of Classic Films No. 13, November 1982
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