Monsieur Spade premieres January 14 on AMC.
The first few episodes of Monsieur Spade show the potential of transporting a past-his-prime version of Dashiell Hammett’s legendary private eye Sam Spade to a sleepy town in the South of France and having him pry open its secrets. Unfortunately, this followup to Hammett’s most famous detective story, The Maltese Falcon, quickly falls apart. Even an excellent performance by Clive Owen can’t overcome the weight of too many clashing plots that fail to build to a satisfying conclusion.
Channeling the swagger of Humphrey Bogart and the masterful weariness of his own Children of Men performance, Owen makes an excellent Spade. Sent to the tiny French town of Bozouls to wrap up some business involving Maltese Falcon femme fatale Brigid O’Shaughnessy, her equally criminal lover Philippe Saint-Andre (Jonathan Zaccaï), and their daughter Teresa (Cara Bossom), Spade winds up with a new job from charming vineyard owner Gabrielle (Chiara Mastroianni). Owen and Mastroianni have strong chemistry, but Monsieur Spade would’ve been better served by developing the romance their characters fall into rather than leaning on the sparks they throw off.
Instead, creators Scott Frank and Tom Fontana pivot eight years into the future, to 1963. Spade is now a widower whose cozy retirement of drinking wine and swimming nude in his gorgeous estate’s pool is interrupted by a brutal killing at the convent where he deposited Teresa. The crime sets off a reasonably well-executed riff on “tough guy protects precocious girl” and an absurdly convoluted plot that involves far too many characters.
One of the key problems is that Frank and Fontana seem uncertain about whether they want to mock or honor the film-noir trappings of The Maltese Falcon and its many imitators. The former is suggested by the awkward intro text noting the absurdity of the greatest private investigator who ever lived winding up in France, characters who repeatedly mock Spade’s name, and the clumsy comic relief delivered by nosy neighbors played by Matthew Beard and Rebecca Root. That makes the seriousness of Monsieur Spade’s plots involving the horrors of the Algerian War seem wildly incongruous. Frank pulled off a blend of violence and romantic comedy 26 years ago in Out of Sight, but the gulf between grappling with war crimes and spy parody is too wide for him to bridge.
Monsieur Spade is at its best when Spade is delivering snappy dialogue and handily disarming people after he’s pulled into investigating the murder with the reluctant help of Bozouls’ sardonic chief of police, Patrice Michaud (Denis Ménochet). Built up for multiple episodes before making his first appearance, Philippe makes a worthy villain. With a wolfish grin and cockiness that matches Spade’s, he provides a real challenge for the detective who’s both out of practice and afflicted with emphysema from his many years of chain smoking. The moody jazz of the score helps establish the noir vibe, as do the glimpses of darkness in the past of even Bozouls’ most saintly-seeming residents.
But these six episodes often feel like they come from multiple shows stapled together. The Maltese Falcon’s titular MacGuffin was a conventionally valuable object, but the one in Monsieur Spade is so bizarre that it causes the plot to twist between small-town drama, espionage thriller, and an awful knockoff of The Da Vinci Code. Monsieur Spade is charming when Spade and Michaud are belittling the skills of a local chef, and it delivers compelling, if out of place, drama through the story of Algerian War veteran Jean-Pierre Devereaux (Stanley Weber). But it’s absolutely awful when its focus turns to a fanatical sect within the Vatican.
The show really falls apart in the final two episodes, when largely pointless new characters are introduced to further muddle the plot before it comes crashing to a messy end. There are so many conflicts – multiple inheritances, a blackmail ring, and an attempt at reconciliation by Jean-Pierre’s dying father – that never go anywhere, but the decision to add in fresh romances and bring back seemingly resolved conflicts so late in the game is especially baffling.
Most troubling: Spade doesn’t feel like the center of his own show. Nearly every break in the case comes from another character’s legwork, the sloppiness of the villains, or some contrivance in the writing. Spade spends most of the climactic conflict stuck in traffic, and even the final parlor scene goes to a guest star who swoops in at the last moment to ostensibly make things right. There’s no inherent problem with having the aging detective lose some fights, provided he still proves the sharpness of his vaunted wits. But the high point of his arc comes in episode 4 when he lays out what he’s figured out while kicking around a French spy. This, to paraphrase the man himself, is not the stuff that dreams are made of.