Casablanca, dir Michael Curtiz, 1942, The Singing Detective, dir Kenneth Trodd, 1986

Two films released to DVD by Warner Brothers regularly vie with each other for top place in lists of best films, but while Citizen Kane is dutifully voted to the top of film critics' polls, it's Casablanca that wins the hearts-and-minds vote of regular punters. There's little point in giving a detailed reprise of the plot of what must be one of the best-known films on the planet; essentially, it's a sophisticated, moving piece of hokum that mixes musical turns, humour, romance, intrigue, and melodramatic action hinging on the disposition of letters of transit Paul Henreid's heroic resistance leader, Victor Laszlo, needs to escape Casablanca. The letters are an unlikely McGuffin (there's no way that authorities in a territory run by Vichy France would honour documents signed by Charles De Gaulle, and in any case there's nothing to stop them arresting Laszlo) that enables Humphrey Bogart's embittered café owner, Rick Blaine, to come to terms with his past infatuation with Laszlo's wife and regain his ideals. Shot as a patriotic quicky with efficient, no-nonsense direction by studio-system veteran Michael Curtiz, it won three Academy Awards, cemented Humphrey Bogart's star status, and quickly became a popular classic. Men identify with Bogart's romantic outsider (or with Claude Rains's womanising police captain, who gets most of the best lines), women with Ingrid Bergman, torn between her duty towards her heroic but stiff-necked husband and her reawakened love of Rick, while everyone hates the Nazis and thrills to the moment when 'The Marseillaise' drowns out 'Watch on the Rhine'. As many quotes from the smart, sassy script have passed into common usage as from any play of Shakespeare's; Woody Allen's Play It Again Sam even takes its title from a famous misquotation of Humphrey Bogart's more peremptory command.

I've no doubt that, just as everybody in Casablanca turns up in Rick's Café Americain, every reader of Crime Time has seen Casablanca at least once, but no matter how familiar you think you might be with the film, it's worth checking out the crisp, pristine digitally-restored print on the new, two-disc special edition DVD. It's as revelatory as the removal of centuries of grime and oxidised varnish from a well-known old master, honing the sparkle in every teary eye and bringing each swirl of cigarette smoke into sharp focus (when people aren't smoking in this film, and almost everyone smokes all the time, it's usually because they have a drink in their hands: if you tried a Casablancan variation of the famous Withnail and I drinking game, in which you have to match the characters drink for drink, you'd be under the table by the second reel). The special edition was released in the United States last year, just in time for the 60th anniversary of the film's win of Academy Award for Best Picture in 1943, and the identical package has just been issued in Britain on Region 2 format. As well as the flawlessly restored print, the first disc includes a fluent and perceptive commentary by critic Roger Ebert, and a separate discussion of the production process by film historian Rudy Behlmer. The second disc features a few brief outtakes, no less than three documentaries, including an eighty-minute feature that does an efficient if uncritical job of covering Bogart's career, the 1943 Screen Guild Players radio broadcast in which the three stars reprise their roles, a pointless but mercifully brief 1955 TV adaptation, a Bug's Bunny cartoon, Carrotblanca, which includes a unnervingly accurate imitation of Peter Lorre by Tweety-Pie, a production history gallery, outtakes from the scoring session, and DVD-ROM features, including script-to-screen and website links, not seen by this reviewer.

Humphrey Bogart's portrayal of Rick Blaine as a tough, straight-talking, subtle-witted, cynical but sentimental hero was reprised in his role of Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. (Incidentally, the Region 2 DVD release of that movie contains only the theatrical release, while the Region 1 DVD is a flipper with the bonus of the earlier, more linear version that was recut to highlight the on-screen chemistry of Bogart and Bacall that wowed audiences of To Have And Have Not.) This potent icon of crime fiction is used straight, no chaser, in Dennis Potter's acclaimed masterpiece, The Singing Detective, which finally gets the DVD release it deserves, although it should be noted that the Region 2 three-disc set is identical to that released in the US a year ago by BBC Worldwide: baffling indeed are the ways of the free market. Eighteen years after it was first screened on British TV, The Singing Detective remains as fresh, shocking, and moving as ever. Throughout their full-length commentary, which admirably memorialises the genius and intent of its irascible creator, director Jon Amiel and producer Kenith Trodd refer to the six-part series as a movie, and that's really what it is: a seamless, intense, oneiric masterpiece woven from recurrent images, flashbacks, flash-forwards, fantasy sequences and four narrative strands that echo and reinforce each other, and are best experienced in the dark. As Philip Marlow suffers from the crippling effects of psoriatic arthropathy in the bustling situation comedy of a hospital ward, his mind replays memories of his childhood in wartime Forest of Dean, the plot of his pulp novel, The Singing Detective (involving a murdered prostitute, Russians, and Nazi rocket scientists, but really revolving around the confrontation between the eponymous detective and his erstwhile client, the slippery, treacherous Mark Binney, who shares his name with the son of the adulterous best friend of Marlow's father), and an imagined betrayal involving a script adapted from his novel, his wife, and a plausible charlatan by the name of Mark Finney. As Marlow, with the help of a hospital psychiatrist, unpicks his memories and travels towards self-discovery, the separate narrative strands, infused with an unholy mix of sex, guilt, betrayal and death, gradually knit together, culminating in a delirious shoot-out and an epiphanic conclusion.

Actor Patrick Malahyde neatly summed up The Singing Detective as a psychological case history told in the form of a detective story set to music. Potter expertly deploys the conventions of film noir to dramatise Marlow's excoriating journey of self-discovery, underscoring emotional drama and flights into dreamy or nightmarish fantasy with carefully chosen, sentimental 1940s songs. By uncovering and understanding the clues buried in his past, the detective writer solves the mystery of his own self, and can embrace the idealised doppleganger of the wisecracking detective who, armed with the cynical wit and raw humanity (and trenchcoat and homburg) of Bogart's Marlowe, effortlessly cuts through the tangled plot of his novel. Michael Gambon gives a career-defining performance as author and crooning detective, there's strong support from a stellar cast that includes Jim Carter, Patrick Malahide, Bill Paterson, Alison Steadman, Janet Suzman, Bill Paterson and, as the young Philip Marlow, Lyndon Davies, and Jon Amiel's direction is supple, subtle and inventive. The three-disc set includes two documentaries, one a snippet from a longer interview with Potter that focuses on The Singing Detective, the other a longer, more recent programme that emphasises the links between Potter's life and work. Potter, who was born in the Forest of Dean and also suffered from psoriatic arthropathy, whose mother, like Marlow's, was from London and played piano in the local pub, always denied that there was any autobiographical content in The Singing Detective, claiming somewhat disingenuously that he'd simply recycled elements of his own experience out of laziness. It's certainly true that Potter revisited or redrew certain themes over and again, but The Singing Detective seemed to go deeper than that: after the first read-through, Potter admitted to Jon Amiel that 'I hadn't realised it was so close to the bloody bone.' While it may not be directly autobiographical, part of The Singing Detective's intensity certainly appears to derive from close parallels between the writer and his writer-hero, which form another layer in an involved, absorbing multi-layered mystery that requires a close and rewarding collaboration with the viewer to unpick truth from fantasy. In addition to the full-length commentary and documentaries, extras include a photo gallery and clips from the viewer feedback programme Points of View that includes a you-couldn't-make-it-up letter of complaint from an irate retired colonel, and nicely documents the mix of enraptured bafflement and splenetic disgust that greeted the programme's first screening.

First appeared in Crime Time 39.

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