Sam Spade was once the greatest detective to ever live (maybe only in San Francisco), but now he’s retired and living in France, much to the chagrin of anyone who ever knew him.

Spade is driving a little girl somewhere. He stops on the side of the road for a smoke and visits the house down below. Someone is home, but she doesn’t quickly answer the door.

He’s looking for Philippe Saint-Andre and wonders if she speaks English. He pulls out a piece of paper to read from it directly. The little girl is Philippe’s daughter, Teresa. Her mother is dead, and Spade is delivering the girl to him. The woman pulls a gun and exclaims that Brigid was a whore and the girl isn’t Philippe’s.

Spade moves on to someone else who may be able to help. The man isn’t happy with how cavalier Spade seems about delivering Teresa to a man who is unknown to him and doesn’t know she’s arriving. Spade says Brigid didn’t spend money frivolously, and she paid handsomely for this, so he wasn’t worrying much about the details. But he knew her and didn’t take the job lightly.

Sam and Brigid were briefly lovers; then he put her in jail. But he subsequently got her out, too. She thought she was dying. She was paroled and lived another four years before dying in a train crash in Istanbul.

Oh, the guy is the police chief. He suggests Spade take Teresa back to America. She’s better off as an orphan than being with Philippe.

One of the French men says Sam Spade is a stupid fucking name.

Sam and Teresa are in a field as a thunderstorm begins. She’s playing with a doll her mom made for her. As the wind picks up, Spade sees a man on a bicycle, and they head back to the car.

The storm is raging, and a tree falls on the car, blocking the road and making the car inoperable. Luckily, the car isn’t too damaged, but Sam has to check under the hood.

He’s soaking wet when he gets back into the car, telling Teresa, who is frightened of the storm, they’re going nowhere for while, so they might as well get some sleep.

When daylight arrives, Teresa is snuggled with Sam in the front seat.

He’s looking under the hood again when he hears a car coming his way. It’s a woman and her dog. Thankfully, she speaks English and gives them a ride. Sam’s surprised her English is so good. He’s got a lot of dry quips, which play out like flirting. He says he’s never been good at learning, but she’s had a good teacher. He’s all ears.

Bozouls, France. Eight years later.

Sam visits a grave marked Gabrielle Spade, 1903-1961.

Sam knows French now. He converses with a woman who tells him Philippe has returned.

Sam is at the doctor, who is digging around and checking his prostate, which is stellar. As for the rest of his health, they need to talk in his office. He’s got the early stages of emphysema. He’s advised to stop smoking as he lights up a cigarette, and the doctor lights a pipe.

Spade knows everyone at the local market. He seems very happy despite losing Gabrielle.

He visits a local convent where children are playing. Sister Angelique answers the gate. She’s new but knows of him through Teresa.

Inside, he sees Teresa sitting alone reading. They don’t greet each other in any way. The head mother is very happy to see him, offering him a cigarette, which he refuses, hoping instead she’ll blow the smoke in his direction.

The bells are off by quite a bit, and it begins a discussion about them, to which Sam says maybe we’re better off not knowing how much time we’ve got left.

He offers her an envelope full of money, which she happily accepts. The Sister knows about Philippe’s return. He has written several letters and spoken to his mother. She brings clothing she has sewn herself.

Sam isn’t happy with that development and wonders why she hasn’t thought to share the news with him. Teresa has a huge trust fund, and their relationship with Teresa only changes as her eighteenth birthday looms.

She thinks that Teresa knows he cares for her, but Sam doesn’t agree. She quotes the Talmud, surprising Sam.

Sam asks his housekeeper to begin locking the doors. She thinks it invites trouble, but he says this kind of thing doesn’t need an invitation. She’s not worried about Philippe.

He still has a hard time not smoking, so he fiddles with a lighter instead. He’s frustrated and anxious.

Sam remembers Teresa running in the fields with Gabrielle. Apparently, she was being blackmailed by Philippe. Gabrielle’s husband was a Nazi, and Philippe is threatening to tell the world. The conflict in Algeria raises the stakes, so she doesn’t want the news out.

She grew up thinking that going to Iran was like going to another part of France. Apparently, Philippe is blackmailing more people than Gabrielle. She doesn’t want everyone to suffer for their collaboration.

At the end of the conversation, Gabrielle asks him to stay with her in the carriage house.

While he’s swimming, a young man named George Fitzsimmons asks after Gabrielle. He’s surprised to learn of her death and once lived in the carriage house with his father, a painter.

Spade was swimming nude. George hopes that he can paint around the estate, and Sam says sure. But they won’t be staying in the carriage house since it burned to the ground.

Spade is cleaning a chicken when he hears a motorcycle drive up. They spot each other through the window, but Sam doesn’t otherwise investigate.

Sam fell asleep the night before with a glass of wine in his hand. Helena, his housekeeper, didn’t appreciate the spill. He asks her to get Henri to see him.

There is a man named Jean-Pierre at the end of the property. He’s friends with Philippe, who might have been the guy at the house last night. Jean-Pierre wonders if Spade really was once a tough guy.

Jean-Pierre offers to sell him half of his club his wife Marguerite’s half, and his wife will go with it. Spade doesn’t have any desire for either.

Spade next visits Mrs. Devereaux. They often speak of Philippe. She hands him a package of money. She’s Marguerite. I guess Spade owns the other half. He wonders if it’s the money that sets him off.

The police chief’s name is Patrice. He joins Spade at a local cafe. They discuss Jean-Pierre and Philippe. Patrice wonders if they have to worry about the two of them. A monk or something comes up to the table for a handout.

Patrice says they’ve discussed two men who want to kill Spade before his breakfast has even arrived. But only one of those is a sociopath. Patrice warned him “back then” that his solution wasn’t a solution. But back then, Gabrielle was paying him.

As he’s driving down the road, the motorcycle is coming in the opposite direction. There’s a near miss, startling Spade.

Up the road, he sees Basem, who is working the vineyard and hoping for rain.

Henri visits Spade. He’s in the military and doesn’t take orders easily. Spade was a conscientious objector, preferring to choose which war he enters himself.

Sam wants Henri to eye Philippe’s file to get an idea of what he was doing in Algeria and since. Spade had convinced Philippe he might live longer by going off to war.

Philippe finally calls and tells him to stay away from Teresa. It’s an unpleasant conversation that ends with a struggle and a gunshot on Philippe’s side of the phone.

Patrice isn’t eagerly jumping at the opportunity to dig into the case. Spade wonders how he’d feel if Philippe hurt himself. Patrice’s brother Maurice is supposedly his best man for the job. He seems like a dipshit.

Patrice Michaud is going to visit the army base in Lyon.

Spade visits the Saint-Andre household, asking if Philippe might be interested in breakfast. Madame Saint-Andre isn’t very pleasant. She tells him to drop dead, and he retorts that he’s trying.

Sam, smoking in the bedroom, recalls the first time he set eyes on Philippe while at Gabrielle’s side in a club.

Spade tells Marguerite that his talent is pretty much ignoring other people’s business now that he’s moved to Bozouls. The more trouble you attain from others, the more likely you are to be pulled down an ugly path.

Marguerite was the first person not to look at him cross-eyed in Bozouls. Jean-Pierre walks in on their conversation and tells Sam he should be more afraid of him since he doesn’t know who he is or what he has done. But when he takes a swing at Spade, it’s pretty clear who should be afraid of whom.

Spade recalls the not-drunk version of Jean-Pierre as not such a bad egg, decent enough that Marguerite married him.

When he gets home, Sam hears rocks hitting the pavement. As he opens the door, Teresa runs up to him, embracing him in a hug, and asks for his help.

She ran the whole way. She’s wearing blood. She got there after Philippe had been shot.

She knows him well. He went to her house and hugged her. Spade wants the real story, not the lie she wants to tell him. She thinks maybe it’s the monk that visited the table. He hit the Mother Superior. Teresa came to Spade instead of Patrice because she was frightened of the latter.

Teresa grabs a much larger serving of booze when Spade goes to ring someone on the phone. Whoever it was didn’t answer. Spade’s next visit is to Helena, who will stay with Teresa while he goes to check things out.

If trouble comes, read the book, he says, placing it before her. Inside is a gun.

Spade is investigating at the convent. It’s silent. He knocks on a door where the girls are locked inside. Teresa has the key. He closes the door again and tells them to be quiet. He’s not leaving.

Teresa’s doll is beheaded in the hallway. In the next room, the sisters are all hanging their heads in prayer. Except they’re all dead, tied up, and shot between the eyes.