‘Monsieur Spade’: Shouldn’t a Detective Show Starring Clive Owen Be Cooler?

There’s something permanently, intriguingly dissatisfied about the men Clive Owen plays. They rarely get what they want, and even less frequently seem pleased with their lot in life. Drug-addicted surgeons, reluctant revolutionaries, wary lovers, struggling writers: A Clive Owen character makes the best of a bad situation, often equipped with a dour voiceover or a dry quip. Not too often does he get the happy ending—in the underrated Inside Man, his master thief manages to elude Denzel Washington’s savvy detective—and the weary predictability of his fate is etched all over his weathered face. He plays loners who have seen it all, bracing for the next bad thing that’s coming.

So, of course, Owen’s a natural fit for the role of an ailing Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett’s iconic gumshoe, who in the new AMC limited series Monsieur Spade is older and residing in the small French village of Bozouls in the early 1960s. Famously played by Humphrey Bogart in 1941’s The Maltese Falcon, Spade was a cynic even as a young man. Now retired and haunted by the death of his beloved, he simply wants to spend the rest of his days far away from the life he once knew. But that former life is barreling toward him.

Running six episodes, and created by ace storytellers Scott Frank (The Queen’s Gambit) and Tom Fontana (Oz), Monsieur Spade is the sort of smart, stylish production that ought to be better than it is. Frank, who directed the entire series, and cinematographer David Ungaro make good use of the French locales, creating a deceptively idyllic setting for the melancholy Spade to solve his latest (and perhaps last) mystery. Owen portrays him as a man with little left to look forward to but still loaded with withering one-liners he rattles off in between the cigarettes that are killing him. The one-time Oscar nominee so perfectly embodies Spade’s spiritual exhaustion and profound pessimism that you wonder why you’re not loving every single second. The culprit is the execution—and, perhaps, in the show’s most cutting twist, Owen himself.

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