Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Monsieur Spade’ On AMC/Acorn TV, Where Clive Owen Is A Retired Sam Spade Solving A Brutal Killing In The South Of France

We’re not sure if there was any backlash when it was announced that Clive Owen was going to portray Sam Spade in a new AMC series. But we’re sure a lot of fans of the quintessential American character raised their eyebrows at the casting for the Brit for the role. However, the show was in the hands of TV veterans Scott Frank (The Queen’s Gambit) and Tom Fontana (Oz, Homicide), so there was more than a good chance that Owen will get a good story to work with.

MONSIEUR SPADE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: After a monologue that describes Sam Spade as one of the greatest detectives ever, when he worked in San Francisco, “before he disappeared,” we see Spade (Clive Owen) driving a car with a little girl in the back through the French countryside.

The Gist: “Bozoulz, France, 1955.” Spade knocks on the door of a villa in this village in the south of France. He’s there to deliver the girl, Teresa (Ella Feraud), to her father, Philippe Saint Andre (Jonathan Zaccaï). The woman who answers the door, Philippe’s mother Audrey (Caroline Silhol), points a beanbag rifle at Spade; he immediately disarms her. She refuses to acknowledge that Teresa is Philippe’s daughter, and calls the girl’s late mother Brigid O’Shaughnessy, who hired Spade to bring the girl to Philippe upon her death, a whore.

The town’s chief of police, Patrice Michaud (Denis Ménochet), discourages Spade from looking for Philippe, but doesn’t give him any suggestions on what to do with Teresa. As the two of them drive in a massive storm, their car stalls out after he breaks hard to avoid a falling tree branch. They sleep in the car overnight, and are given a ride by a woman named Gabrielle (Chiara Mastroianni), who was driving by in her Rolls Royce. She offers Spade and Teresa the chance to stay at her vineyard while Spade figures things out.

Eight years later, in 1963, Spade is still in Bozoulz, visiting the grave of Gabrielle Spade, who died two years prior. He not only stayed in the village, but he married Gabrielle and even learned conversational French. In those eight years, he has become well known and liked in the village, and it seems that retirement is treating Spade well, except for the burgeoning case of emphysema his doctor warns him about; the doc tells him to stop smoking cigarettes, even as he’s puffing on his pipe.

Spade goes to the local convent to give the Mother Superior (Martine Shambacher) his usual donation. Fifteen -year-old Teresa (Cara Bossom), is a resident there. The Mother Superior tells Spade that Philippe has been communicating with Teresa, via letters delivered by Audrey. Spade suspects that Philippe is trying to get back in Teresa’s life to cash in on the trust Teresa will have access to when she’s 18.

But Spade has more to worry about if Philippe is back in town; Gabrielle was being blackmailed by Philippe back in the day, and she hired Spade to persuade him to go away. He convinced him that going to war in Algeria is a better alternative than what Spade might do to him if he stayed. With the war over for about a year, Philippe is back and looking for payback.

Philippe appears on a motorcycle on the estate late at night, and the next day Spade tells Philippe’s friend, Jean-Pierre Devereaux (Stanley Weber), to tell Philippe to engage him directly. For his part, Jean-Pierre offers the half of a local club that Spade doesn’t own, but Spade points out that that half is owned by Jean-Pierre’s wife Margueritte (Louise Bourgoin).

Spade gets a late-night call from Philippe that ends with what sounds like a gunshot. He’s concerned enough that he pays Audrey a visit; she tells him to “go fuck yourself.” The next night, Teresa comes by, having run to Spade’s estate from the convent; Philippe visited her, sporting a fresh gunshot wound. Then she describes a monk who seemed to be after Philippe; she took off during that melee.

When Spade calls the convent and gets no answer, he gives Teresa a gun to protect herself and goes to the convent. There, he sees Teresa’s classmates locked up and a disturbing discovery in the chapel.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Monsieur Spade is supposed to evoke the neo-noir feel of the most famous screen depiction of Sam Spade, which was Humphrey Bogart’s portrayal in 1941’s The Maltese Falcon. But in reality the series, created by Scott Frank and Tom Fontana, plays more like Agatha Christie’s Poirot or something in that vein.

Our Take: The main curiosity of Monsieur Spade is how Clive Owen portrays Sam Spade. Spade written by Dashiell Hammett as a quintessentially American character, hard-boiled and tough as nails. Bogart gave Spade the sardonic quality that has defined the character in the 80 years since The Maltese Falcon. The trench coat, loose tie, fedora and scowl became the template for every “tough guy” noir detective portrayed in pop culture ever since.

But the Spade portrayed by Owen is a guy who has been touched by love, and is now living out a pretty cushy retirement in the south of France. He’s not a softie by any means, and Owen gives his dialogue the proper flat, world-weary manner that should characterize Spade’s voice. Do we sometimes hear a lilt of Owen’s British accent seep through? Yep. But it’s not exactly the first time he’s played an American, and he does a good job of making Spade a cross between the hard-edged Bogart version and a more contemporary character with more nuance and depth.

We’re not necessarily sold by the story itself. The first episode takes a full hour to get viewers to the crux of the story, which is the murder of the nuns at the convent, and until that point, the only plot we had to hang onto was the inevitable return of Philippe and how he and Spade would interact. Until the discovery in the convent, it didn’t seem like that was going to be enough to sustain the story over six episodes.

Look, we get that Frank, who directed the first episode, and Fontana needed some time to set up why Spade was an ex-pat in a French village. But given the fact that we got precious few flashbacks in the first episode, we didn’t get enough details to really latch onto Spade’s history with Gabrielle, Philippe and Teresa over that time. Will we get more of that story? We’d imagine so. But we wanted to see a bit more of it in that first hour, just to give us a better grasp on just what the point of the story was.

But with the true mystery underway, we’ll see Spade in his element, investigating these murders while still trying to figure out just what Philippe wants with him as well as Teresa. Let’s hope that some of the side characters we saw in the first episode, like the battling Devereauxs, add more to the story.

Sex and Skin: Spade likes to swim in his pool naked, so we see his tush as he gets out of the pool.

Parting Shot: Spade finds the five nuns, all shot multiple times, in the chapel.

Sleeper Star: Cara Bossom’s Teresa is intriguing because she does not have a great relationship with Spade, and Spade is OK with that. But she insists her father Philippe isn’t the bad guy Spade thinks he is. It’s an interesting dynamic.

Most Pilot-y Line: As Spade listens to a radio report about John F. Kennedy’s speech vowing to land a man on the moon by the end of the sixties, Spade says to himself, “A man on the moon… what the hell for?”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Owen’s performance transcends the languid plotting in the first episode of Monsieur Spade. Will Owen make us forget about Bogart’s portrayal of Spade? Absolutely not. But he does a good job of bringing Spade into a more of a modern context.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.