In one of the first scenes of “Monsieur Spade,” a new six-part series from AMC, American detective Sam Spade, played by Clive Owen, lies on his side, grimacing as a doctor examines his nether regions. “Best prostate of the morning,” the doctor says cheerfully, taking off his rubber gloves. He then tells Spade to come to his office to tell him that he has emphysema and that he should stop smoking.
Will Spade, the embellished, inscrutable hero of Dashiell Hammett's novel “The Maltese Falcon,” get a prostate checkup and quit smoking?
Yes actually. The new series, written by Scott Frank (“The Queen's Gambit”) and Tom Fontana (“Homicide”), is set in 1963, some 20 years after the events of John Huston's 1941 film, in which Humphrey Bogart played Spade. This time, the detective retired and lived in the town of Bozouls, in the south of France.
In a flashback at the beginning of the first episode, we learn that Spade was hired to bring a girl, Teresa, to her father in Bozouls. Mission failed: her father is missing. But Spade meets a rich and glamorous widow, Gabrielle (Chiara Mastroianni), who asks him to stay with her and take another job.
The couple falls in love and marries, and when we meet Spade, he is a widower who has inherited Gabrielle's beautiful house, pool, vineyards, and wealth. He lives quietly, still mourning Gabrielle (whom we see in frequent flashbacks), he speaks poor French and is quite well-liked by the insular locals, until, naturally! — the past comes back to cause problems.
“This genre has always been catnip for me,” Frank, who also directed the show, said in a recent joint interview with Fontana. But when he was approached to create a show based on Spade, Frank said, he initially turned it down because he had another Hammett project in mind.
Then an idea occurred to him: “What happens to these Bogart-esque guys when they get older?” He contacted Fontana, who suggested setting the series after the Algerian War, a conflict between France and the Algerian National Liberation Front that ended in 1962 with Algeria, a French colony, gaining independence.
At the time, “there was tension and a dark cloud” over France, Frank said. “This raises the question: who is French and who is not? And then we have Sam Spade struggling with his identity, his old life, his new life.”
Owen, dapper in a dark suit and crisp white shirt during a recent interview at a London hotel, said the role of Spade felt like a gift. “I'm a big lover of film noir, a big fan of Bogart,” he said. “I have an original 'Maltese Falcon' poster on my wall.”
Owen talked to Frank, he added, “about the older Sam Spade, how he would play with the idea of the macho, the stoner. But in essence we are adopting the original material.” The pause. “I didn't get to wear the hat much, though.”
Frank and Fontana certainly created a complicated plot worthy of Hammett. Six nuns are murdered at the local convent, which houses an orphanage where the now-teenage Teresa (Cara Bossom), the girl Spade brought to Bouzols, lives. The murders seem to concern a mysterious boy from Algeria whom everyone is trying to find, and the plot is intertwined with Church and State conspiracies, Algerian and World War II subplots, and is populated by a memorable cast of characters: a sarcastic police chief. (Denis Ménochet); Teresa's diabolically villainous father, Philippe (Jonathan Zaccaï); and the obligatory femme fatale, Marguerite (Louise Bourgoin), a singer who co-owns a bar with Spade.
Owen's dryly unflappable performance is also a tribute to Bogart, whose performances he adores, he said. While preparing for the role, in addition to “reading and rereading” Hammett's short stories and novels, Owen “drowned on Bogart,” he said. He recalled telling the director: “Don't be scared, I'm not going to do a bad imitation, but I'm going to do it based on Bogart's intonations.”
The interesting thing, Owen added, is that “you think Bogart is laconic, but he's super fast and agile, and the key was flying through these beautiful rhythmic speeches, getting them out like it was the easiest thing.”
Although he speaks French on the show, Owen said he had not spoken the language before and learned it phonetically (with an American accent) for the show. “I found it difficult,” he said. “I have a lot of respect for actors who act in another language.”
Bourgoin, who plays Marguerite, said in a telephone interview that “like every Frenchman who discovers an American writing about France, I feared that there would be anachronisms, clichés. But not at all: it is very credible.”
In an obligatory nod to a love interest, Marguerite and Spade's platonic relationship is infused with a bit of sexual flavor. But the relationship between Spade and the teenage Teresa, who grew up in the convent, is the emotional heart of the story.
“He has lived a life of relative solitude, has never had a family environment and grew up in a frigid religious environment with no one he loved,” said Bossom, who plays the character. “He has hardened her into a person who does not show honest emotions, or not without great difficulty.” (Does she remind you of anyone?) As the show progresses, Bossom added, Teresa begins to emulate Spade's speech patterns.
“I think the more time you spend with her, the more you see that she's a little bit from the old block,” Owen said with a laugh.
Frank said he had not wanted to “make beautiful Provence” or emulate “the skewed angles and dark shadows found in typical film noir”; He was most influenced by the strong compositions and color palettes of French films of the 60s and 70s like “La Piscine” and “Le Cercle Rouge.” The idea, he said, “is that Sam is living a quiet life.”
Will there be more Monsieur Spades retired? “If the show does well, I definitely have other ideas,” Frank said. Maybe Owen will get another chance to wear the hat.
