Being the huge fan of old pulp and noir stuff that I am, I got super excited when I heard there’s a new Sam Spade limited series with Clive Owen playing the famous private detective.
I’m not one who self-spoils on things I’ve already committed to watching when they drop; in fact, I tend to avoid spoilers like the plague in those cases. If I’m already on board, then I want to be surprised. Alas, this predilection of mine meant that it wasn’t until I sat down to watch the premiere that I discovered that the new Spade series wasn’t titled Monsieur Spade for nothing.
It’s another of these French co-productions that have been popping up like fungus all over the mediascape. For examples, see the new War of the Worlds reboot for MGM+ (nee Epix) and the Daryl Dixon spinoff of The Walking Dead for AMC. Unlike some Hollywood co-productions, the French seem very, well, French when it comes to insisting that the finished product for these endeavors absolutely must include and display as much of the French language as possible, and preferably the French culture, too. The desire itself is arguably understandable, but…
Sam Spade is about as American as a fictional character can get, folks: A lifelong resident of San Francisco, created and penned by an American writer from the great state of Maryland (Dashiell Hammett). Not only is shoehorning him into France a hard and seemingly random sell, but my suspicion is that most American fans of the character are unlikely to be enthused at the prospect of having to listen to umpteen hours of French dialogue, nor at the hours of reading that must go along with it for those not fluent, including French dialogue spoken by Sam Spade, of all people (as he does in the series, a lot), in what is otherwise ostensibly a Sam Spade story.
I will acknowledge here that the French, as a people, do have their own appreciation for these kinds of private detective stories, and for noir in general. (And of course, “noir” is a French word.) But that is what I would call a meta-concern: No amount of popularity among French consumers creates a narrative justification for dropping hard-boiled and extremely Californian private eye Sam Spade into the French countryside, six thousand miles away.
And before you ask: No, the script doesn’t even sell it well. The opening scene straight-up says, “We know you’re thinking, What is Sam Spade doing in France?, but nevermind all that. Just watch!” I found that lazy, at best, and at worst… well, we’ll just leave it at “worse than lazy.”
Now, I know there’s a growing trend to show more foreign languages being spoken in TV shows and films produced for and/or acquired for airing in the west, and I’m generally a fan of that idea, but this is a bad fit and a bad beat for a great and distinctively American character. It doesn’t help that the plot for Monsieur Spade somehow manages to be both derivative and absurd at the same time. Owen does his best with the acting challenge posed by the overtly contrived project, and his French isn’t terrible, as non-native speakers go, but at the end of the day…
Well, I can’t name a single person who thinks “France!” when they hear the name “Sam Spade”. Not even the French people I know. When the Irish recently co-produced a new Philip Marlowe movie, they had the good grace to allow it to be a Philip Marlowe story and did not insist on the interjection of Gaelic (or other Irish cultural signifier) into every other line of dialogue. For the Irish, supporting a great character who’s always been popular with the Irish people was enough for them to want to get involved, especially with Irish actor Liam Neeson in the starring role.
In this American writer’s humble opinion, French producers should consider adopting a similar approach, especially when leveraging American writers’ material. The temptation to bring everything — from the cast and crew, to the plot itself — into France, literally, may be powerful, but it’s a temptation the French should consider resisting more in the future. Not when it comes to media by and about themselves, of course — they have a right to a flourishing arts culture of their own — but certainly with co-produced adaptations of foreign artists’ work, at least.
Although executed well enough, I found Monsieur Spade insurmountably contrived and fundamentally inexplicable, as would-be coherent art, not to mention a slog to get through, thanks to the over-abundance of subtitles. It’s a project that only works when yanked violently out of its own context, root and stem, and at that point, why not just produce something else?