Monsieur Spade

 Monsieur Spade is a limited series first broadcast on AMC.  It has a fascinating premise:  Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammet's private eye had decamped from Frisco to rural France after solving the mystery of the Maltese Falcon.  He has in tow the daughter of Brigid O'Shaugnessy, the femme fatale in The Maltese Falcon (Bogart's love interest in Huston's film who has killed, among others, Spade's partner.)  Spade parks the child at a convent and begins a love affair with a wealthy local woman, a widow who operates a vineyard.  He marries the widow, but she dies from some disease that leaves her youthful and beautiful up to the end.  Then, a mad monk murders six nuns in Teresa O'Shaugnessy's convent.  Spade is enlisted by the resentful and arrogant local police to assist in the investigation.  More bodies pile-up and the plot becomes convoluted to the point of being impenetrable.  The six episode show (which feels much, much longer) is shot in a remarkable village somewhere in the south of France -- the town is bifurcated into two parts, one perched atop sheer limestone cliffs and the other neighborhood at the base of those cliffs in a gloomy, narrow gorge -- this part of the town of Bozoul is called Le Trou (the hole).  Clive Owen plays Spade and he exudes a silky, James Bond-style menace.  The show's dialogue is sharply written with many good lines and the program features a cavalcade of impressive French and British actors, including one guy in a bit part who has the ugliest mug ever seen on screen (he looks like deformed toad); there is a British spy who is plump libidinous version of Julia Child, lots of handsome French man and dark-haired women, also gorgeous, who seem to be part gypsy. (The show features lots of "butt-porn" -- that is, the leading men are frequently shown naked from the rear.) The mad monk is scary, a figure out of a Gothic novel, and there are lots of spectacular shots of the luminous French countryside.  These features might engage the viewer for a couple episodes, but the show is ridiculously awful -- the plot makes no sense at all, just piling up one absurdity after another and the casting director has blundered by putting too many people with fashion magazine good looks in the major roles -- you can't tell the beautiful women apart and the beefcake male roles are also all fungible.  People keep getting killed but you have no idea why or can't recall the plot well enough to figure out who these casualties are.  The show becomes increasingly desperate in its last three episodes -- this is the kind of thing that would have been released to critics as an advance peek with only one or two shows available to be reviewed; by the end of the series, the script is introducing new characters at a rate of about one every 20 minutes in the hope of clarifying the incredibly confusing plot.  The show climaxes with a bunch of killings in which we don't know who is dying or why and, then, a long fifteen minute scene in which a Black woman (apparently affiliated with the CIA) appears as a deus ex machina and conducts a seminar with all the surviving cast members tutoring them in the plot that no one, including the characters in the show, understands.  This sequence is so ineffably bad it must be seen to be believed.  

Spade relies upon the narrative device that Alfred Hitchcock called "the MacGuffin."  The MacGuffin, like the Maltese falcon, for instance, is the object of desire and the center of the plot -- pursuit of the MacGuffin by competing claimants is the engine of the narrative. As Hitchcock famously observed the MacGuffin, in itself, has no value at all.  In Spade, the MacGuffin is a small Algerian boy, reputed to be the Messiah or Mahdi, or, more prosaically, some kind of cryptographic prodigy; the kid is a human computer for breaking codes.  Everyone is desperately trying to kidnap the taciturn small boy -- he looks like a nocturnal mammal, perhaps, a lemur.  As far as I can determine, the CIA, the British Secret Service, French pro- and anti-Gaullists, Algerian terrorists, agencies called the OAS and FLN, and, even, the Vatican are in bloody contention for the boy.  This idiotically complex plot is further confused by a series of flashbacks that are poorly motivated and not well demarcated from the events set forth in the fictive now, presumably around 1965.  At one point in the very first episode, I found myself utterly baffled by events on-screen -- apparently, when I looked away, the narrative jumped eight years without signaling that change in time as far as I recall.  If the series weren't so protracted and dull, I would be tempted to recommend that readers look at a little of this show just to discover how promising ingredients (good actors, an atmospheric location, excellent camerawork) can all come to nought if the narrative is ridiculous.