If you’re on any form of social media, you probably know that on January 1, an early incarnation of Mickey Mouse entered the public domain. This prompted the usual memes putting the beloved character in decidedly adult situations and, in just a few months, we’ll be treated to a Mickey Mouse slasher film.
For a different, more pastoral, approach to elevated fan fic — this one conducted with the approval of the Dashiell Hammett Estate, rather than public domain — look to six-episode limited series Monsieur Spade, which will roll out on AMC, AMC+ and Acorn TV.
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Monsieur Spade
Hailing from the powerhouse creative duo of Scott Frank (The Queen’s Gambit) and Tom Fontana (Oz) and boasting a likably droll central turn by Clive Owen, Monsieur Spade takes Hammett’s Sam Spade and drops him into a bucolic retirement in the South of France. There, rather than reconfiguring the protagonist for an ironic excursion to the dark side, Frank and Fontana explore what happens to an irritated and irritable character when, after finding peace, he’s plunged into the middle of escalating crime and unrest.
There’s a whole subgenre of stories focused on famous detectives gone to seed. Sherlock Holmes and obvious Sherlock Holmes proxies seem to be experiencing senility, drug addiction or general obsolescence with strange regularity. Of course, Sherlock Holmes is one of the more recognizable and clearly defined characters in all of storytelling, while Sam Spade was just featured in The Maltese Falcon and four additional Hammett short stories. He’s an indelible character, but it probably isn’t as clear to most modern audiences which traits are ineluctably Spade-ian and which can be most fruitfully upended.
This results in Monsieur Spade being a somewhat fuzzy thing. I was consistently intrigued by the series, especially for Owen’s interestingly prickly work and the beauty of the surroundings, but it isn’t always clear why Frank and Fontana were inspired to reconsider Sam Spade, and their approach isn’t always compelling.
The action begins in 1955 with Spade (Owen) transporting a young girl from Istanbul to the town of Bozouls. Teresa is the daughter of the late Brigid O’Shaughnessy and Philippe Saint Andre (Jonathan Zaccaï), a local miscreant who everybody agrees is ill-suited for fatherhood. But Sam Spade promised Brigid he would deliver the girl to her father, and Sam Spade keeps his promises.
Eight years later, Spade is still in Bozouls. He married a vineyard owner (Chiara Mastroianni’s Gabrielle), and when she died he inherited her estate and continues to live there, establishing a comfortable and low-key routine. He bickers agreeably with Patrice (Denis Ménochet), the local chief of police, flirts a little with Marguerite (Louise Bourgoin), a local club owner, and bickers more threateningly with Marguerite’s husband, Jean-Pierre (Stanley Weber).
Teresa (Cara Bossom), meanwhile, is living and studying at a nearby convent, where she has very little relationship with either Philippe or Spade. Everything gets upended when the convent is the site of a horrifying massacre, connected in part to Teresa and more directly to a mysterious Algerian boy. Like the title relic in The Maltese Falcon, the boy is wanted by an eclectic assortment of special interests, who each imagine he’s precious for different reasons.
Spade, as a character, isn’t an investigative savant in that Holmes manner. Spade’s sense of justice is competitive. He expects to be able to outthink everybody in the room, inciting petty and not-too-petty squabbles. Sometimes finding answers will require that he gets punched or somebody else gets shot. The Spade of Hammett’s book and John Huston’s perfect gem of a film is a sardonic chess player without emotional investment. But what happens to this alley cat when he becomes domesticated? What does it mean for Sam Spade to be in the middle of a case in which the MacGuffin, the stuff that dreams are made of, is a human and not an object?
It’s a provocative and interesting question, but one that won’t be deeply meaningful to viewers who don’t know any earlier incarnation of Spade. The decision to leap eight years forward early in the premiere lets the creators inject smaller mysteries relating to the events of the intervening time, but it erases most of the fish-out-of-water evolution of the character.
The series is generally fine with viewers not knowing or caring who Sam Spade was before. Film lovers will remember that Brigid is the Mary Astor character from the film, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t — just as it doesn’t matter if audiences don’t catch the reference to Barton MacLane’s Dundy or can’t recognize that a story Spade recounts to Gabrielle in a flashback was in Hammett’s novel, but not the film. Everything feels like it could be a reference, but nothing needs to be; the key use of the “Colonel Bogey March,” for example, might be a cheeky nod to Humphrey Bogart, but since the composition — you know it from The Bridge on the River Kwai or The Parent Trap — actually predates the legendary star, it might just be a coincidence.
More practically, “Colonel Bogey March” has ties to the British military in various colonial contexts, and ties into French colonialism in a story that’s been set with France’s war with Algeria as a backdrop. Spade wants to be the smartest guy in the room, but he doesn’t really understand France’s modern history, either as it relates to Algeria or to internal fissures during World War II. What isn’t always as clear is whether Spade cares to learn, or if Frank and Fontana care if the audience learns. Instead, more frequently, Monsieur Spade plays as a series of red herrings escalating toward a finale that, fittingly, is a bunch of people shooting each other in the dark with limited regard to geography or motivation.
It’s a six-episode build to chaos that can only be cleared up by a cameo from an Emmy-winning actress who appears out of nowhere, spends 15 minutes insulting everybody for their role in the mess and then leaves. That sounds like hacky drama, but the guest actor is so good, and so spectacular with Owen, that my pivot from uninterested to entirely engaged was swift. Plus, it isn’t like The Maltese Falcon is a work of impeccable logic. It’s simply impeccable.
Owen, thankfully, isn’t doing anything that resembles a Humphrey Bogart impression. He’s affecting a general mid-Atlantic accent and effectively balancing the throwback machismo that has grounded his work since Croupier with awareness that he and Spade are both approaching 60. The character has been stripped of a lot of what makes him iconic — his fedora remains mostly on a shelf and, at the urging of a doctor, he’s fighting the desire to smoke constantly — and Owen mines poignance from Spade realizing that smug superiority doesn’t always play when your adversaries are younger and tougher, if not necessarily smarter, than you.
Monsieur Spade soars when it’s just Owen verbally sparring with his various co-stars, which can be just as satisfying when the back-and-forth is about condiments for an omelet as when it’s about murder. He and Ménochet are especially good together, though I also quite enjoyed the banter between Spade and a pair of British neighbors (concealing very obvious secrets) played by Matthew Beard and Rebecca Root. I wish the series had more of a sense of Teresa as a character, though especially in the last two episodes Bossom and Owen find appealing comic undertones to their interactions. It still weakens the show that Bourgoin, Mastroianni, Weber and Zaccaï are stuck playing characters who seem interesting enough to be the heroes and villains in their own lives but are, instead, interlopers and pawns in Spade’s thwarted retirement.
The stories just don’t come together frequently enough in Monsieur Spade, but with gorgeous scenery, crackling dialogue and Owen’s best TV role in years, there’s still enough to give this venerable character some new life.
