The character Sam Spade, though he appeared in several short stories by Dashiel Hammett, is known most prominently as the original mid-century American noir private eye from The Maltese Falcon. Cynical, menacing, but with something like real heart throbbing underneath the cold exterior, he laid the foundation for an entire genre, and was immortalized on film by Humphrey Bogart (among others). Now, thanks to AMC (produced in collaboration with Canal+), he’s back, and the man inheriting Bogart’s mantle is an almost unrecognizable Clive Owen, who is gaunt and—somewhat distressingly, for those of who remember him in his swaggering heyday—a little old, too. And yet, age has not diminished his intensity; it has only dimmed his mischievous humor here and there, but that’s more a function of the character, whose sense of humor is expressed rarely, and only in hard-boiled quips that, in the wrong hands, would come off more ominous than funny. It’s hard to say if Owen’s performance is a worthy tribute to Spade (you get the sense that they could have called him anything, and the “Spade” persona doesn’t really add much beyond a shortcut for backstory), but what’s undeniable is the subtle strength of his performance, and the understated brilliance of the show itself.
In the universe of Monsieur Spade, the hard-boiled detective has left California, become further entangled with Brigid O’Shaughnessy (the femme fatale from Maltese Falcon) and, after her death, taken money to deliver her daughter Theresa to her father, Philippe Saint Andre, in a town called Bozouls in rural France. The action opens in the years after World War II, with Spade and Teresa driving through the French countryside, to a wistful piece of music seemingly composed for the show, all melancholic guitar and horns, and there’s something about the slow grandeur of the scene that’s reminiscent of a different kind of drama, one more closely associated with 1970s film or even new wave French. It’s beautiful, it’s delicately paced, and it’s an early signal that Monsieur Spade is constructed with the kind of artistic assurance that conveyed to me that I could put aside the usual critical worries about whether the next few hours of my life would be tedious and unrewarding.
That confidence is present at every step, including the story. Teresa’s father is not present, but his reputation is everywhere, infusing Bozouls with a grim worry hedging on fear even in his absence. He’s in the army, he’s in Algeria, he’s somewhere. Spade, frustrated in his duty, meets a woman named Gabrielle whose husband was a Nazi collaborator murdered by partisans in World War II. It’s left her alone on her massive estate, and her beauty captures Spade. Soon, it’s eight years later, Gabrielle too has passed, and Spade is an older man, living with only a housekeeper in the grand estate, swimming naked in the pool, and meeting doctors who tell him he has the beginning states of emphysema. It’s at that point when Philippe Saint Andre returns, though originally he is still more of a ghost; it’s only later that the wonderful Jonathan Zaccai (who played Raymond Sisteron in one of the greatest spy shows ever made, The Bureau) appears in the flesh.