Notes From The Singing Detective

By RICHARD CORLISS

A sheet-music salesman reels through the Depression with murder on his mind, adultery on his conscience and a song in his heart. A young man walks into an English home to burgle a loveless couple and rape their brain-damaged daughter. An American woman, troubled by fantasies of her lost child, walks out on her philandering oaf of a husband, whom she may have stabbed to death. An aging British novelist pilfers the life of his beautiful niece for the plot of his new book. Another novelist, strapped to a hospital bed with a grotesquely disfiguring skin disease, plots revenge on all those who have loved him not quite enough.

Welcome to the world of English writer Dennis Potter: a nightmare realm of domestic violence, scored to the haunting lilt of pop standards. His output embraces dozens of television plays, half a dozen screenplays and two novels. But the range of Potter's work is less impressive than its searing ferocity and compassion. His haunted characters dwell in the surreal land we all inhabit, as we float vagrantly from suffocating reality to liberating fantasy, from pessimism to possibility, from fear to hope -- and then back, always back again, when we realize that the conditional tense holds even more horror than the present. Ultimately a Potter protagonist is likely to realize, like Dorothy back from Oz, that life is best endured at home. Just plant a bitter smile on your face, and whistle something sweet in the dark.

The mood suffused Potter's 1978 BBC serial, Pennies from Heaven (in which Bob Hoskins played the music salesman), his 1982 film, Brimstone and Treacle (with Sting as the satanic young man), and the current Track 29 (starring Theresa Russell as the American wife). In October his novel Blackeyes (about the plagiarizing novelist) was published, to acclaim, in the U.S., and last month the BBC aired his new series, Christabel, a domestic drama set in '40s Germany. Masterpiece Theatre will show the series in February.

The Potter celebration reaches its climax: The Singing Detective, his 1986 masterpiece about a hospitalized writer, has begun a six-week run in Manhattan's Public Theater movie house. When this 6-hr. 42-min. serial was broadcast on PBS earlier this year, it attracted a rabid cult following, and New York Times film critic Vincent Canby called it "one of the wittiest, wordiest, singingest-dancingest, most ambitious, freshest, most serious, least solemn movies of the year." Now Detective, handsomely directed by Jon Amiel, is on the big screen where it belongs -- and where it looks marvelous.

Novelist Julian Barnes has described Potter as a "Christian socialist with a running edge of apocalyptic disgust." And Potter's works have provoked disgust in the more easily shockable segments of the British public. The tabloid press denounced the Detective series as pornography, and as Potter recalls, "one Member of Parliament got up on his hind legs and said that he'd counted the number of swear words and bare bums. But that's partly because television is taken more seriously in England, which means more seriously by the fools as well." One scene -- a flashback of a desperate encounter between the writer's mother and her husband's best friend -- was sexually explicit, even by the liberal standards of British TV. "There was a debate about it at BBC, " Potter says, "but they decided to let it go uncut. And in fact the consequences of that particular adultery were illness and death and great misery. So it could hardly be held up as an invitation to promiscuity." In the end, Detective earned robust ratings and a British Academy of Film and Television Arts best actor award for Michael Gambon, who plays the writer.

On the suppurating surface, this writer, Philip Marlow, is as racked and brilliant as the man who created him. Marlow, who relishes the cheap irony that his name echoes that of Raymond Chandler's famed sleuth, is a failed novelist hitting 50 with a terrifying thud. His career has been sidetracked by illness and bile. His marriage to an actress (Janet Suzman) is just an awful memory. He lies in a London hospital with psoriatic arthritis, a crippling condition of the skin and bones. The pain and the pain-killers force Marlow's mind down strange old country lanes and treacherous culs-de-sac. Figures from the past make cameo appearances in his nightmares, and traumas from his Gloucestershire childhood mingle with the plot of his first novel, The Singing Detective. This time, he is the hero -- and, maybe, the murderer. Doesn't each man kill the thing he loves most? Himself?

In one sense, Potter is no Marlow. His works -- novels as well as plays -- are lionized, though the author is unawed: "I think novels are rather easier to write than plays. Years ago I loved the theater -- until television came along, until I really saw it, saw what you could do with it. I love what television could be if they left it alone." Exemplarily, British TV has left Potter alone to create his atonal rhapsodies, whereas Marlow suffers the impotence of creative failure. And yet, Potter knows Marlow well; the author's biography crosses his character's life at crucial points.

Potter was born, the same year as Marlow, into a poor family in the Forest of Dean, those sprawling West Country woods where young Philip spots his mother copulating. Potter moved to London, as his character does, was graduated with honors from Oxford, ran unsuccessfully for Parliament in 1964, then began writing teleplays. For half his life he has suffered from the same disease as Marlow, and must stay occasionally in the sort of hospital he lances so vigorously in the series. Potter insists that Detective is not autobiographical, "except for the illness, with which I'm overly, sickeningly familiar. And yet there's something about it that comes closer to the bone than I ever wanted or intended. I realized this when I first watched the rushes. I started to get clammy-handed!"

The sympathetic viewer feels that way too, tracing Marlow's life and fantasies like a truth-seeking gumshoe. "I wanted to make an odyssey," Potter says, "in which a man in extreme pain and anguish tries to assemble the bits of his life. That's the way you have to deal with physical pain, you know. You have to stand outside it and say, 'O.K., destroy me if you must, but I'm going somewhere else.' Those acute, extreme forms of illness almost force you to divide yourself between the suffering animal and the human being who has to moderate the suffering with intelligence and stoicism. And, if not kill it off, at least control it, put the dog on the leash."

The fantasy Marlow is, remember, a singing detective. As he did in Pennies from Heaven, Potter scatters period songs to make ironic points. A quartet of doctors turns Fred Waring's Dry Bones into a sardonic production number; The Teddy Bears' Picnic plays over memories of a forest seduction. "No matter how sugary and banal they might be," Potter says, "old popular songs are in a direct line of descent from the Psalms. They're saying that the world is other than the thing around you -- other than age, other than sickness, other than death. These songs are chariots; they take you somewhere. The little bounce of the music can deliver you back, or forward, into some of your finest emotions."

So the music is a psalm and, for Philip, a therapeutic balm. In the final shot of The Singing Detective, Marlow the writer is able to walk out of the hospital in the guise of Marlow the slick detective. "He's stopped lying there moaning and suffering," Potter observes, "ready to deal with the world as a detective would -- tough-minded and able to manipulate it." In the pain- streaked world of Dennis Potter, that counts as a happy ending: hero cured, beautiful woman on his arm, and Vera Lynn warbling We'll Meet Again in the tuppenny jukebox of his soul.