‘Monsieur Spade’: The Stuff That Dreams Were Made Of

I’m watching a new show: AMC+’s “Monsieur Spade,” a miniseries that picks up the life of the noir private eye character Sam Spade from Dashiell Hammett’s classic novel “The Maltese Falcon” and a few short stories.

The miniseries was created by A. Scott Frank and Tom Fontana. Frank is perhaps best known as the writer of “Out of Sight” and the X-Men movie “Logan,” with which “Monsieur Spade” shares the theme of a world-weary hero suddenly saddled with the care of an exceptional young woman. Fontana is best known as the creator of the TV crime series “Oz” and a writer on Paul Attanasio’s “Homicide: Life on the Street,” based on David Simon’s book.

“Monsieur Spade” is an odd thing, a sequel to a book and film that no one felt needed a sequel. The venue has changed from the nocturnal rain-drenched streets of San Francisco to the sunny countryside of Bozouls, an idyllic hamlet in southern France. The story begins in the 1950s, well after the events of “The Maltese Falcon,” and quickly time jumps to the fateful year of 1963, during which most of the six-episode show takes place.

The pilot begins, fittingly, at night in a drenching rainstorm, but the storm quickly passes and the sun emerges and remains, signaling that this is not to be your typical noir.

The story concerns not the pursuit by a motley band of thieves and mountebanks of a mysterious treasure — “the stuff that dreams are made of” — but rather the murder of a group of nuns who are caring for a young girl, the daughter of “Falcon”’s Brigid O’Shaughnessy and a brutal mercenary who has returned to Bozouls from the war in Algiera.

The slow-burn story’s not really the point, though. British actor Clive Owen does a creditable job channeling Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade from John Huston’s famous 1941 film adaption, and the snappy tough-guy dialogue is a main attraction, even if it’s occasionally rendered in American-accented French. (I always found it odd that the definitive image of Spade comes from Bogart’s performance, though Hammett’s physical description of Spade is completely the opposite: “He looked rather pleasantly, like a blonde satan.”)

The show is nominally a noir detective story in the Hammett/Raymond Chandler tradition. Spade is well drawn as the no-nonsense American P.I. with a core of steel, and there are the requisite sultry dames, menacing but incompetent cops, the skeevy thugs, the convoluted mystery, the cynical worldview.

But there are other elements as well, befitting a story about a character well past his prime: A sense of regret and loss in a world increasingly out of control, the spectre of death looming in the summery setting. As in “Logan,” the main theme appears to be how a man who has been through the literal and figurative wars can find something meaningful to hold onto at the end of it all, and what that might look like.

“Monsieur Spade” may not be your glass of rye, neat, but it’s got it charms.