Roush Review: Clive Owen Is ‘Monsieur Spade,’ Classic Gumshoe in 1960s France

Matt Roush January 10, 2024, 9:30 am

Monsieur Spade

Matt's Rating:

For many a Turner Classic Movies fan, he was immortalized by Humphrey Bogart in 1941’s The Maltese Falcon. Private eyes don’t come much more hardboiled than Sam Spade, the shamus par excellence who goes Gallic in Monsieur Spade, an evocative six-part period thriller from Tom Fontana (Homicide: Life on the Street) and Scott Frank (The Queen’s Gambit).

As the latest incarnation of Spade, circa 1963, Clive Owen cuts a more elegant figure of rugged and world-weary charisma, with banter that cuts like a knife and a wisecrack for any occasion. When told to “drop dead,” he quips, “I’m working on it,” expressing film noir fatalism with every drag of his ever-present cigarette.

Spade’s sardonic attitude is pungent as ever when the melancholy gumshoe, now a brooding widower with a vineyard, retires to the serene French village of Bouzols, which suddenly becomes a hotbed of international intrigue. “I’m allergic to other people’s business,” he growls, which doesn’t stop him from getting involved after a grisly massacre of nuns at a local convent. Not that he has much choice, since that’s where he has housed his precocious teenage ward, Teresa (Cara Bossom), whose late mother — long story — is Maltese Falcon‘s femme fatale Brigid O’Shaughnessy, to whom Spade still feels a tug of loyalty.

Before long, he’s confronting spies and snipers in a town scarred by WWII treachery and the more recent Algerian conflict. There is a Falcon-style MacGuffin in the form of a silent boy named Zayd (Ismaël Berqouch) whose special gifts make him “the hub of a many-spoked wheel.” Everyone wants him, with the body count to prove it. Leave it to Sam Spade to cut through the byzantine hokum, after all these years still living by his cynical philosophy, “I’m not drawn to anybody. I’m just dubious about everybody.”