Parts I and II:Thursday, August 3, 8 pm Sunday, August 6, 2 pm Thursday, August 10, 8 pm Sunday, August 13, 2 pm Parts III and IV:Friday, August 4, 8 pm Sunday, August 6, 4:30 pm Friday, August 11, 8 pm Sunday, August 13, 4:30 pm Parts V and VI:Saturday, August 5, 8 pm Sunday, August 6, 8 pm Saturday, August 12, 8 pm Sunday, August 13, 8 pm Marlow's the name, detective fiction's the game. But Philip (P. E.) Marlow-Marlow without the "e"-laid up in hospital with a crippling skin disease, isn't writing much these days. Immobilized, humiliated and helpless amidst the infantilizing hospital atmosphere, Marlow works and reworks his novel The Singing Detective in his fevered mind, weaving in memories of a wartime childhood and elements of his current shattered state to create a sinister fiction based on unhappy fact. "Who done it?" The answer-and for that matter, the question-is multi-layered. We're dealing with all the pain of a backwoods boy's loss of innocence witnessing his mother's infidelities; the trauma of the adult, tortured by psoriatic arthropathy and the even more painful journey into the psyche-the key to overcoming his illness; and finally, the trials of the Singing Detective himself. "I get the jobs the polite guys pass over," carps the gumshoe who moonlights as a nightclub crooner ("I've got you under my skin..."). He's been drawn into a case of espionage involving a pasty art collector, a couple of call girls with connections in high places, and two hired guns in existential crisis à la Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In all, six characters in search of an author. Cut to P. E. Marlow, who's in no mood to be generous. He's fashioned the characters out of the figures of his youth: his pub-crooning father, his victimized/victimizing mother, her illicit lover. As their story unfolds, so does the mystery of Marlow's troubled psyche. "A rat always knows where his tail is," as the Singing Detective says... Despite the many pleasures of the genre, we must admit that there are only a handful of detective films that are also truly compelling works of art. The complaint is not with the pulp literature of which these films are born but with film's seeming inadequacy to explore the one thing that makes a detective more fascinating than, say, a beat cop or any other man of action: the machinations of his mind. The Singing Detective triumphs over this limitation precisely by being about the mind of the detective-and about a detective of the mind. As a film, it is extraordinarily literary, with dialogue that ranges from the hardboiled ("the air was like an Eskimo's mother-in-law: bitter and icy") to the poetic; as literature (for it is a book on film), it is wonderfully cinematic, with mysterious sets, haunting music, hallucinatory dissolves, overlapping dialogue and time frames, and an ever deepening reflexivity. Michael Gambon (formerly of the Royal Shakespeare Company and now with the National Theatre) won every British acting award there is for his unflinching portrayal of Marlow, the writer and the detective. The rest of the casting is equally superb, with the deliciously sinister Patrick Malahide as the villain(s), Alison Steadman (from Mike Leigh's ensemble) as Marlow's mother, and a wounded looking youngster with a most remarkable command of dialect named Lyndon Davies as young Philip.