In hindsight the
biggest shock about Monsieur Spade is not that the greatest detective
who ever lived ‘in San Francisco’ (as the subtitles tells us tongue-in-cheek)
has gotten the Peak TV treatment but that it’s taken this long for it to
happen. It’s understandable that no one wants to go near one of the most iconic
characters in one of the greatest films ever made but considering just how
darkly cynical Humphrey Bogart’s version of the detective in The Maltese
Falcon was, you could make a very good argument that every ‘white male
antihero’ has been drawing on him ever since.
Even more than
eighty years after it came out Bogart’s portrayal of Sam Spade is still
shocking in his cynicism and immorality. That there was anything remotely
redeemable about him came through something in Bogart’s skill to make the most
blatantly cynical characters somehow likeable, despite the fact Spade does not
commit a single unselfish act in the entire movie and has no discernable
redeeming qualities. The moment after his partner is murdered, he orders his
secretary to remove his name from the window and just make it Sam Spade. He
clearly thought very little of him, he was having an affair with his wife and
the cops consider him a prime suspect in both Archer’s murder and of the man
who they believe killed him – something Spade laughs off but does not deny as
something he is capable of. He spends the entire film betraying all the thugs
searching for the Falcon, beating up the hoodlums and alternately having an
affair with Brigid O’Shaughnessy and yelling at her for lying to him (which, to
be fair, she is). Even the supposed moral code he shows at turning Brigid in
for her killing his partner doesn’t exact undo the fact he tells her while he’s
doing it: “If they hang you, I’ll always remember you.” The line between him
and almost every major lead character from Peak TV, from Tony Soprano to Marty
Byrde, could not be more obvious. And given that the world of literature has
always written prequels and sequels to Sam Spade’s adventures, it’s kind of
surprising it’s taken this long for us to get to this point.
Still, I can see
all of those people who loathe the idea of their classics being mutilated by
new versions rearing up just from the title even though the whole purpose of
the detective novel in the 1930s was that the character had many, many
adventures. But rest assured: Monsieur Spade does not try to reinvent,
reboot or re-anything to Sam Spade. The legendary detective has relocated to a
small-town in the South of France, and the action has been shifted to 1963. Have
no fear; Sam Spade is still the same relentless, cynical bastard he’s always
been.
Clive Owen takes
on the title role. He does not try to do a Bogart impression any more than he
tried to do a Bill Clinton one in Impeachment. It does not change the
fact that, just as in the latter role, from the moment you see him striding
across the screen, you have no doubts that he can do the job perfectly. In his
posture and his basic looks Owen has always born a passing resemblance to Bogart
and we’ve seen him play characters just as cynical in Closer and Children
of Men. Owen will turn sixty this year and his Spade is already aging when
we first meeting, but he still has the capacity of a Bogart to look ruggedly
handsome the older he gets.
The show is the
creation of Tom Fontana, who I named one of the grand masters of Peak TV in an
earlier article and Scott Frank who spent years adapting the work of Elmore
Leonard to the big screen, was nominated for an Oscar for writing Logan and
whose last two projects earned him Emmy nominations for writing and directing
the Netflix series Godless and The Queen’s Gambit. You could not
ask for two more qualified hands to take on the mantle of Hammett, and indeed
much of their dialogue is peppered with the kind of exchanges that you easily
see being done in a film noir.
Here’s just one
between Spade and French police chief.
Spade: And now
you’re maligning my war record.
Chief: You have
to have fought in a war to have a war record.
Spade: I thought
we agreed to only discuss this matter when we we’re both drunk?
Chief: “I’m
hungover. Does that count?”
Unlike most film
noir, in a limited series the plot has to count for something, and Fontana and
Frank are great at that. Spade has come to a small town in France in 1955 with
an eight year girl named Teresa who is the daughter of Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Still
the con artist, she managed to get out of prison faking a mortal illness two
years into her sentence. A decade later, after dying in a train crash in
Istanbul (allegedly) she paid Sam an obscene amount of money to deliver her
daughter with a French criminal to his family.
Sam is clearly uncomfortable with the child
but more uncomfortable owing a debt of any kind. Even after Teresa crawls up to
him after a night on the road, he can’t squirm away from her fast enough. The
next day, they encounter a young French woman who speaks English and picks them
up. We then flashforward eight years later, and Sam is visiting the gravestone
of this woman, who he married and has been dead for two years.
Sam is clearly
now familiar with both the French people and the language (much of the series
is subtitled). He has just been diagnosed with emphysema and is told his doctor
he has to quit smoking or it will kill him. (The doctor is smoking a pipe at
the time.) Sam tries to go on a health kick for a while, but it is inevitable
by the end of the episode he will be smoking again, and given the way he’s
coughing even without smoking, he knows he may not have much time left.
Sam has given up
other people’s problems but he has lost none of his cynicism. At one point
hearing a translation of Kennedy’s remarks for man to go to the moon, he
grumbles: “What’s the point?” He knows
he’s good at solving other people’s problems but that doesn’t mean he likes
people that much. It’s clear he loved Gabrielle and still speaks fondly of her
but after two years you get the feeling he resents her too. Even his idea of
protecting Teresa is to put her in a convent where she can be cared for by nuns
– and therefore out of his sight, except in case of extreme necessity.
In the opening
of the series Philip Saint-Andre, Gabrielle’s father has returned to town. After
two episodes we have yet to lay eyes on him but his presence unsettles everyone.
Sam ‘handled’ Philip by sending him to Algeria where he assumed the man would
be killed in action. He did this as the favor to the mother superior of the
convent, who had fought in the resistance and was now opposed to violence. In a
flashback to the convent, the Chief of Police is cynical as to her reasoning: “And
if we did not actually pull the trigger on the weapon that killed him, your God
will be all right with that?” Now it seems clear that did not happen.
And as a result at
the end of the first episode, the six sisters who were at the convent were
killed one by one – and Teresa was there when it happened.
Teresa is
clearly Brigid’s daughter: she has no problem withholding critical information
from her father even when she runs to him covered in blood the night it occurs,
returns to the convent and denies and when the police come to talk to her makes
it very clear she wants a lawyer present. (“My mother taught me that,” she
tells them. “You were four when she said that” Sam says in exasperation.) She
remains stoic even after she and her father are shot at on the way back home. “How
do you know they were shooting at me?” she says blandly. Only at the end of the
second episode does she begin to relay what she saw – and if you remember The
Maltese Falcon you remember her mother was very capable at telling a new
set of lies when her first were unraveled. The only part that seems real is
when we learn that she used her doll – which was actually a dagger disguised - to stab the man who killed the six nuns, and
that’s only because she says she did it to get away. Considering who her
parents were, I’m even less inclined to trust this version of events; the only
reason there might be some truth to it is because some of it is in alignment
with facts Sam knows independently.
As is always the
case with a good film noir, there are many colorful characters around. The Chief
of Police is played by noted French actor Denis Menochet; fans of Inglorious
Basterds will remember him as the French farmer who Hans Landa first
revealed the full nature of his evil too. He’s clearly made of sterner stuff in
this version, though it’s clear he considers the law a sword rather than a
shield.
There are the
Devereauxs, the farmer who worked in Gabriele’s vineyard and who resents Spade
because she left it to him and Peggy his wife, the owner of a nightclub, who is
faithful to her husband but can’t convince him of that. There is George
Fitzsimmons, the young aspiring British painter who shows up on Sam’s stoop at
the same time the action begins (I don’t think that’s a coincidence) and his mother
who seems all too interested in a painting that he has and is too fond of
Saint-Andre. There is Henri, Sam’s equivalent of a snitch whose friendship with
him Sam refuses to think he deserves and Audrey, Philip’s mother who greets Sam
with a shotgun when they first meet. Sam treats all of them with the same level
of contempt and says that they are all liars and monsters, no matter what evidence
to the contrary they give.
It's fitting
that Monsieur Spade takes place in the South of France, considering how
much of the New Wave and other French cinema was inspired by the film noir of
the thirties and forties. That it is set in a nation still recovering from the
horrors of occupation and dealing with the monstrosities that Algeria would
become is also fitting considering how much the cynicism would be fitting the era
we met Spade, a world where the Depression crushed dreams and made everybody a
criminal. This is not a Sam Spade for the world of Peak TV because Sam Spade
was fit for it before television existed. One of many ironies in this series is
that Owen’s Spade doesn’t understand the world he lives in but today’s audience
would understand the kind of character he played even if they never read
Hammett or saw Bogart play him. The only reason they might think they’d seen Monsieur
Spade before is because all the cops and criminals they’ve seen in the last
twenty-five years have been playing some version of his character for that
period. Now the original is here, and it is superb. The world will learn to
like to talk to a man who likes to talk.
My score: 4.75
stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment