Binge

Monsieur Spade

One has to admire the audacity of creators Scott Frank and Tom Fontana—imagine picking up the mantle of Sam Spade, the prototypical hard-boiled detective made famous by Dashiell Hammett’s cynical, lyrical crime novels and a once-in-a-lifetime performance from Humphrey Bogart, and retooling him not just for a new age, but a new medium: prestige television. Lucky for us, then, that the minds behind „The Queen’s Gambit“ and „Oz“ know their way around a screenplay and a camera and have picked the right man to pick up Bogey’s mantle: „Monsieur Spade,“ a six-part miniseries starring Clive Owen as the legendary private eye, is an early contender for one of the best series of the year.

Sam Spade in France after WW2, it‘s a joy tha works. The character, though he appeared in several short stories by Dashiel Hammett, is known most prominently as the original mid-century American noir private eye from The Maltese Falcon. Cynical, menacing, but with something like real heart throbbing underneath the cold exterior, he laid the foundation for an entire genre, and was immortalized on film by Humphrey Bogart (among others).

Now, thanks to AMC (produced in collaboration with Canal+), he’s back, and the man inheriting Bogart’s mantle is an almost unrecognizable Clive Owen, who is gaunt and—somewhat distressingly, for those of who remember him in his swaggering heyday—a little old, too. And yet, age has not diminished his intensity; it has only dimmed his mischievous humor here and there, but that’s more a function of the character, whose sense of humor is expressed rarely, and only in hard-boiled quips that, in the wrong hands, would come off more ominous than funny.

It’s hard to say if Owen’s performance is a worthy tribute to Spade (you get the sense that they could have called him anything, and the “Spade” persona doesn’t really add much beyond a shortcut for backstory), but what’s undeniable is the subtle strength of his performance, and the understated brilliance of the show itself. 6 episodes, briliant all the way through. Afterwards, no bad idea to put on John Zorn‘s Spillane!