Monsieur Spade TV Review

Last Updated on January 12, 2024

PLOT: The year is 1963, and the legendary Detective Sam Spade is enjoying his retirement in the South of France. By contrast to his days as a private eye in San Francisco, Spade’s life in Bozouls is peaceful and quiet. But the rumored return of his old adversary will change everything. Six beloved nuns have been brutally murdered at the local convent. As the town grieves, secrets emerge, and new leads are established. Spade learns that the murders are somehow connected to a mysterious child who is believed to possess great powers. 

REVIEW: In the annals of the mystery genre, the names of author Dashiell Hammett and character Sam Spade are amongst the most iconic. Despite Sam Spade’s legacy thanks to the film The Maltese Falcon starring Humphrey Bogart, Hammett’s creation has only been featured in a handful of films since the 1930s. In a new AMC series from The Queen’s Gambit creator Scott Frank, we get the first television series featuring the private investigator in Monsieur Spade. Picking up decades after The Maltese Falcon, Clive Owen plays the title role during Spade’s retirement in the South of France. The result is a pulpy noir that should have reignited an interest in the classic character and iconic works of Dashiell Hammett. Instead, it flounders for multiple hours, leading to an unsatisfying conclusion. With so much talent involved, I expected more from Monsieur Spade, especially with the legacy of the source material making this a welcome return to the noir genre recently revisited in HBO’s fantastic Perry Mason.

Monsieur Spade opens with a series of title cards that invoke Sam Spade’s legendary career stemming from his time as a detective in San Francisco. Anyone who has seen the classic Bogart film knows that Spade dons a fedora and a trenchcoat like no other, spouts witty one-liners and gets the dames and the bad guys. Here, we meet Clive Owen doing his best to carry the weighty presence of Spade as he brings a young girl named Teresa to her father in the South of France. When the drop-off does not go as planned, Spade finds himself putting down roots in the quaint village of Bozouls for eight years. The series then shifts to Spade living as a widower after marrying Gabrielle (Chiara Mastroianni) and taking over her villa. Spade has a contentious relationship with now teenaged Teresa (Cara Bossom) as well as local Chief of Police Patrice Michaud (Denis Menochet) and a feud with Phillippe Saint Andre (Jonathan Zaccai). Spade has a feud with multiple people in town, which is meant to drive the story’s complex cast of characters.

The opening episode of Monsieur Spade moves along at a snail’s pace as it introduces the denizens of Bozouls and finds Spade elegiacally wandering from place to place, dropping bon mots as he goes along sipping coffee, swimming, and smoking despite a negative medical diagnosis. The series picks up a bit when the local school run by a convent becomes a murder site when the six nuns in charge are brutally killed. Spade must then don his detective hat, reluctantly, of course, to resume the case he had not completed almost a decade earlier. We now have an ensemble that has become a rogue’s gallery, giving Spade a slew of suspects to interrogate and track. Unfortunately, the series focuses more on Spade moving along and anecdotally finding clues rather than actively searching for the killer. The story at the core of Monsieur Spade is meant to be one that fits alongside the far more energetic Maltese Falcon but is saddled with twenty years of weight on the private investigator. Clive Owen is a fantastic actor and would have made a fantastic Sam Spade had he been given more to do in this series besides wallowing in an American accent and occasionally spouting something clever.

Where The Maltese Falcon was set in the days before World War II, the shift to the 1960s for Monsieur Spade changes the focus on the conflict between France and Algiers. This connects multiple characters, including Jean-Pierre Devereaux (Stanley Weber), a local man who harbors anger towards Spade, and a supposed relationship the detective had with his wife, Marguerite (Louise Bourgoin). It also factors in with a young, quirky painter named George Fitzsimmons (Matthew Beard), who lives as Sam’s neighbor with his mother, Cynthia (Rebecca Root). All of these seemingly distinct characters seem to have tenuous connections to a search for both Teresa and a young boy named Zayd (Ismael Berqouch). Zayd is this series’ equivalent of the titular falcon, as he is what everyone wants; their motivations are all unique but somehow connected. The series, which consists of just six episodes, struggles to find the right pacing until three episodes in and then loses it as it crashes into an underwhelming final chapter.

Scott Frank, who brought us the brilliant The Queen’s Gambit, directed all six episodes of Monsieur Spade and channels his work writing the Old Man Wolverine story in Logan by making this about a much older and jaded Sam Spade. The change from San Francisco to the South of France is odd but allows the series to bask in the beautiful scenery of the European locale of Bozouls. All six episodes were co-written between Frank and Tom Fontana (Homicide: Lift on the Streets, HBO’s Oz). Fontana and Frank and producer Barry Levinson have extensive experience with mysteries, crime stories, and creating whip-smart dialogue. The world-weary look that Clive Owen brings to playing this take on Sam Spade works when he isn’t clad in a hat and coat that do not look right on him. That seems to be the consistent issue with this series: it looks slightly off and does not feel the way Dashiell Hammett would have written it.

Monsieur Spade is a good mystery hidden within the bookends of a decent series. There is a lot of good material here and a meaty role for Clive Owen that, unfortunately, never quite came together into the project it should have been. A political thread connects this story’s true narrative and the wasted potential for revisiting one of the most iconic characters in American literature. The trouble is that Monsieur Spade starts to slow with an uneven opening chapter that tries to cram far too much into a single hour. When the series finds its footing halfway through the six-episode run, it is too late as the story careens towards a haphazard finale. Monsieur Spade could have been great if Clive Owen had a tenth more energy, but that is not the actor’s fault. This story should have been a slam dunk revival of Dashiell Hammett’s writings but instead serves as a curiosity that likely will be quickly forgotten.

Monsieur Spade premieres on January 14th on AMC.

Monsieur Spade

AVERAGE

6