‘Monsieur Spade’: Clive Owen Detective Series Is a Big Disappointment

For a character who is at the center of one full-length story, The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade is as iconic as it gets in the world of detective fiction. Dashiell Hammett’s book, and John Huston’s 1941 movie adaptation with Humphrey Bogart, loom impossibly large over the gumshoe genre, to the point where Spade is just as famous as Philip Marlowe and Mike Hammer, who have appeared in far more novels and films over the years.

But the Sam Spade who appears in the new miniseries Monsieur Spade is not a legend where and when we find him. The story begins in the French countryside in 1955. Spade, played here by Clive Owen, is on a job to deliver a little girl named Teresa to the shady French father she has never known. No one knows him there. After he introduces himself to the local police, one of the cops mutters in French, “Samuel Spade. Stupid fucking name.” The case doesn’t go as Spade expected, but the lovely town of Bozouls — and the lovely widow Gabrielle (Chiara Mastroianni), who offers him a ride after he crashes his car into a tree — prove enormously appealing to him. And suddenly, it is 1963, Spade has never gone home to his native San Francisco, and is enjoying the sweet life in the large estate that he inherited from Gabrielle, who died in the intervening years. Though the locals know of Spade’s former profession, they mostly speak of it in a playful tone, because it seems so at odds with the laid-back retiree they’ve come to know. Jean-Pierre (Stanley Weber), a war veteran convinced Sam is fooling around with his wife Marguerite (Louise Bourgoin), says, “We’ve all heard the stories about what a tough guy you once were,” in a sneering tone suggesting he doesn’t believe the stories are true. Because we’re watching a show about Sam Spade, of course there is a murder — more than one, in fact — but it’s an open question whether he’s still the man he was when he talked about the stuff that dreams are made of.

More from Rolling Stone

• 'Like Flowers in Sand' Is Your New K-Drama Obsession

• French President Defends Gerard Depardieu Amid Sexual Assault Claims: He 'Makes France Proud'

• 'A Murder at the End of the World' Creator Brit Marling on That Finale Twist

The idea to separate the famous private eye from the time and place for which he’s best known comes from a pair of acclaimed creators in their own right: Scott Frank, a genre fiction master on the big screen (Out of Sight, Logan, Minority Report) and an Emmy magnet on the small screen (Godless, The Queen’s Gambit); and Tom Fontana, whose work on St. Elsewhere, Homicide: Life on the Street, and Oz blazed a trail for what we think of as prestige TV in the 21st century. Add up Frank, Fontana, Owen, a terrific ensemble of French actors, and an intriguing twist on an immortal character, and Monsieur Spade should be hard-boiled heaven, right?

Unfortunately, the miniseries never quite lives up to all that assembled talent, nor does it ever really justify the idea of placing a much older Spade so far outside his and our comfort zone. It’s not without its charms — Clive Owen’s magnetism chief among them — but it’s fairly low-energy, and much less stylized than you would expect from Frank as director and co-writer.

Now, I was lower than most critics on Frank’s two Netflix miniseries. But that was almost entirely due to pacing issues. (Godless in particular felt like it should have either been the feature film it began life as, or else a substantially longer show that had more time to explore the characters and world that Frank established.) There was no denying how great the shows looked, how Frank inspired fantastic performances from actors like Jeff Daniels, Merritt Wever, and Anya Taylor-Joy, and how special their best moments felt. Monsieur Spade lacks those kinds of highs, and at times seems content to merely hit various signposts of its genre, then move on quickly to the next one.

As can be the case in this kind of adventure, the mystery is incredibly complicated. It involves long-buried secrets from both World War II and the more recent war between France and Algeria, secret societies within the Catholic Church, British spies, the messy relationship between Spade and the teenage Teresa (Cara Bossom), gangsters, warring factions in the French military, and a mute boy whom everyone is eager to get their hands on, for various reasons. A confusing plot isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. There’s a famous story where the filmmakers adapting Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (with Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe that time) asked the author to explain who murders a chauffeur midway through the novel; Chandler admitted that he had no idea, yet both book and film are classics.

In this case, though, the plot proves so impenetrable that a Very Special Guest Star has to arrive late in the finale to try — and mostly fail — to explain it to Spade and the others, and to call them out as dummies who should have figured this all out before things got so messy. It’s easily the highlight of the six episodes, which doesn’t speak incredibly well of what happens up until that point.

The sprawling nature of the mystery means we don’t spend as much time with Sam Spade as the title might suggest. There are long passages focusing on Jean-Pierre dealing with PTSD from Algeria, on handsome young soldier Henri (Oscar Lesage) showing an inappropriate amount of interest in the underage Teresa, local cop Patrice (Denis Ménochet) getting into various jurisdictional battles with the Church and the national government, and more. Some of these ideas and performances are interesting, but it leaves the central conflict — How has the passage of time and the dramatic change of scenery impacted Sam’s ability to do this type of work? — severely underfed. Owen has some nice moments that play off the new locale and era, like when Spade banters in French, or when he uses Dean Martin’s “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head?” as inspiration for how he violently interrogates a suspect. Mostly, though, Spade seems at peace with his new life — he’s not even that troubled by news that he has early stage emphysema and has to stop smoking if he doesn’t want to die. There’s not enough internal or external conflict about him having to take his fedora and his gun out of mothballs to investigate a new case.

There are various references and Easter Eggs from The Maltese Falcon, including a recurring use of “Colonel Bogey March,” which is most famous from The Bridge on the River Kwai, but whose name invokes the man who most famously played Spade. And some of the supporting performances are fun, notably Rebecca Root and Matthew Beard as an alleged mother and son who move in next door to Spade, and are clearly not what they seem.

At one point, Patrice suggests that matters are growing so dangerous that Spade should protect himself with something more reliable than just his wits. His wits are very much intact here, and at times, he gets to demonstrate just how potent those wits can be. But Monsieur Spade feels like it should be wittier, and livelier, than this. It’s not terrible, but it’s a big disappointment, given the idea and the people involved.

Monsieur Spade debuts on January 14 on AMC, AMC+, and Acorn, with episodes releasing weekly on each platform. I’ve seen all six.

Best of Rolling Stone

• 70 Greatest Comedies of the 21st Century

• Risky Business: Every Tom Cruise Film, Ranked – Updated

• 70 Greatest Music Documentaries of All Time