Terry Zobeck, our man on These Mean Streets, volunteered (or was he dragooned? — I forget) to review the new AMC show about Sam Spade in France. He’s decided to take it an episode at a time.
On the other hand I made the call to DVR the whole thing and binge it at the end.
Here’s Terry with a first installment — with episode 2 airing tonight:
Monsieur Spade.
Pardonnez-moi. Mais pourquoi?
Last week the AMC cable network began airing the limited series, Monsieur Spade, starring Clive Owen, which plops San Francisco’s premier PI down in southern France in the early 1960s. Mon Dieu!
The series starts with a prologue. I do wish that folks would follow the great Elmore Leonard’s advice and forget prologues. It’s 1955 and Spade’s been hired from beyond the grave by Brigid O’Shaughnessy to pick up her abandoned 8-year-old daughter, Teresa, in Turkey and deliver her to her grandmother in the small French village of Bozouls.
It seems that a few years after Spade sent Brigid to prison, she contracted a fatal disease, and with Spade’s help, received a compassionate release.
But then — surprise — she wasn’t dying.
In fact, she skips parole and heads to Turkey where according to one of the best bits of dialog in this episode Spade responds to a question as to where the little girl’s mother is: “She went antiquing.”
Presumably, she was still after the Falcon.
Not only did she apparently find it, but she seems to have picked up a husband and a child.
Right.
Anyway, she dies and leaves in her will, along with a sizable trust fund for her daughter, a request that Spade find Teresa and take her to grandmama. How Spade was supposed to have convinced the Turkish authorities to turn over the girl to him or how he could travel through Europe with a young girl of no relation is never explained. Ah well, it was a more innocent time.
Grandmama turns out to be a bitter and angry old woman who wants nothing to do with Teresa. Her son is missing and presumed dead and she never cared for Brigid. She sends Spade packing and, on the road out of town, a tree falls onto his car. An attractive widow comes along and gives the two wanderers a ride.
We then flash forward eight years to 1963 and learn that Spade married the woman and placed the girl in a local convent. Spade’s wife has died and left him a charming French country home where he idles away the days swimming and the nights at a bar he co-owns with an unhappily married woman, whose husband resents his presence.
This set-up covers the first 15 minutes.
The mystery gets moving when there is a rumor that the girl’s father, who Spade apparently had a hand in sending to fight in the Algerian War of Independence some years previously, may have returned from the dead. Teresa dislikes Spade for having sent her mother to prison and her father to his death in North Africa. Seems to be a rational point of view and one that is hard for Spade to argue. And yet she runs to Spade when she discovers multiple gruesome murders.
Monsieur Spade was produced by an international cast and crew and shot on location in southern France. Owen, I suspect, is the only actor known to most non-French viewers. He was superb in The Children of Men.
But here, so far, his performance is so low-key and laconic that its hard to build up any enthusiasm for his portrayal of Spade.
On the talk show circuit to promote the series Owen claims that he is a huge fan of the Bogart film. He studied it and The Big Sleep to capture Bogart’s mannerisms and style. If so, I don’t see any of it on screen, at least in episode 1. Among the other cast, only Denise Ménochet as police chief Patrice Michaud, stands out.
Monsieur Spade may well turn out to be a fine crime thriller, but so far there is nothing that justifies it having Spade as the main character. Other than a couple of references to the original story of the Black Bird, there is simply nothing to justify the Spade angle.
Perhaps Brigid is still alive and will make an appearance to reclaim her daughter, the trust fund, and Spade.
Maybe the murderer is Joel Cairo taking his revenge on Brigid and Sam.
But I doubt it. The sad fact is that Monsieur Spade could as well have been titled Monsieur Marlowe. Or Monsieur Holmes for that matter.
I guess Monsieur Poirot has been taken already.
