Best Seller (1987)
MGM DVD (region 1, 4)
d. John Flynn; pr. Carter DeHaven; scr. Larry Cohen; ph. Fred Murphy; m. Jay Fergusen; ed. David Rosenbloom; cast. James Woods, Brian Dennehy, Paul Shenar, Victoria Tennant, Allison Balson, Charles Tyner (110 mins)
In the 1970s an unlikely author became a media celebrity: Joseph Wambaugh.
Although a policeman within the LAPD he had turned to writing best sellers: but despite his success, he remained a policeman for some time before eventually leaving the police force. His fiction and procedural non-fiction became the subject of several movies, including adaptations of The New Centurions, The Choirboys and The Onion Field, although what remained most tantalizing about the prospect of an author-cop – namely, his creatively symbiotic relationship with the criminality that inspired him – remained an unexplored issue. However, in the script for Best Seller, veteran Larry Cohen (drawing on Wambaugh’s persona but not by directly adapting his works) sought to explore just this enigma – the creation of a book based on the paradoxical bond between two adversaries and the moral compromises such a work entails. Best Seller is the one film that confronts what it is in the fascination between cop and criminal that results in the symbiosis of police literature (a hybrid of fact and fiction). The idea of cop and killer being two sides of the same coin is not a new conceit but what is unique about this film is the manner in which it delineates the ingredients for the fusion that for police literature (and cinema) to work. Despite taut direction by John Flynn this most self-reflexive of cop movie thrillers failed to find much of an appreciative audience.
Best Seller begins in 1972 with a robbery during which policeman Brian Dennehy is injured in the line of duty and left for dead. By 1987, Dennehy is a best-selling author of crime fiction and non-fiction.
Yet he remains a policeman and in the process of eliminating a suspect in a dockyard encounter is aided by a mysterious stranger (James Woods) who then disappears. Dennehy is a recent widow and has been having trouble writing his next book. He becomes worried when his teenage daughter tells him she was driven home by his “friend”, a man who seems to know all about them. Soon, Woods contacts Dennehy directly with a proposition designed to give Dennehy another best seller. Woods reveals that he is a contract killer, who has long been “working” for a major corporate enterprise run by high profile businessman Paul Shenar. Dennehy is disbelieving and soon Woods goes to great lengths to prove his validity. Despite himself, Dennehy is intrigued by the case but wants to know more about the loathsome killer and what made him the way he is. He thus journeys to Woods’ childhood home and meets his parents but although Woods sees the challenge of the book being how to make him a sympathetic figure, Dennehy seems more interested in his monstrousness, not his pseudo-philosophical justifications of it. When Shenar soon learns of the manuscript he arranges for Dennehy’s daughter to be targeted.
The notion of symbiosis is central to Best Seller as the bulk of the film concerns the long time it takes for Woods to convince Dennehy of his identity and his experience.
But this is not because Dennehy disbelieves, although he says he does, but because Dennehy needs to find some kind of validation for the barely acknowledged bond he feels with the man he professes to loathe. The bear-like Dennehy is a somewhat emotionally desperate figure here (in as much as the film implies) and feels a connection with a man whom by rights he should abhor. His questioning of Woods’ credibility allows him the needed time to reconcile within himself his increasing empathetic dependence on Woods. To do so, he must put aside his morality and it is this aspect of compromise that troubles him. Woods, however, is beyond such moral issues. Despite his desire to reveal all, Woods is plainly thrilled by the prospect of exposing the moral abyss behind the corporate ethic and thus enacting revenge against Shenar for dispensing with his services. Like Dennehy in that sense, he feels he has lost his purpose and wants to regain it – that is the common bond they share and overcome in their increasing emotional dependence on one another. Woods longs to be taken as a sympathetic figure, even a hero and although Dennehy is contemptuous of the corporate misdeeds he is far more troubled by the prospect of Woods being in any way heroic.
The film is quite adept at these tough characterizations and there is an unnerving energy between the two actors.
Indeed, there is a smarmily ingratiating side to Woods’ arrogance, which Dennehy also responds to. Tellingly, Woods says that Dennehy likes him almost despite himself – a realization that plagues Dennehy throughout the movie and is eventually played out over the fate of the innocent daughter as initial contempt becomes begrudging bond and finally respect. Part of the pleasure in Best Seller is the way in which Dennehy’s dilemma – how to make Woods sympathetic in the book and for his own peace of mind – becomes the subject of the film. Although Woods is clearly a morally despicable and sexually perverse figure, he is humanized through the movie, turning the film into a prolonged study of the process of empathy as able to over-ride any moral or social precursors. Empathy may be a natural human impulse but this film examines it as ambiguously aberrant. Dennehy realizes this and must repeatedly cling to the differences between them as implied in their adversarial relationship as cop and killer as much as Woods seeks to negate this. Although Woods also seeks empathy, Dennehy is threatened by it and the film cleverly makes the viewer share in his mixed emotions. It is this self-reflexivity about narrative, character and empathy that truly distinguishes Best Seller above its plot flaws. read more
DVD DETAILS:
Vision
The anamorphic widescreen transfer is of serviceable quality, preserving the film’s cold, dejected look. Despite this mediocre clarity, the film has a terse, gritty feel throughout and its nervy editing rhythms neatly compliment the performances, especially Woods. There is a fine montage sequence covering Dennehy’s career even if his actual writing of the book is glossed over. With camera position mediating the on-going relationship between these two men in all its emotional uncertainty, the film emerges as a superior character-driven thriller. It suffers in that poor image sharpness makes the film at times diffuse its harder edge. Still, there is much in it that is unusual for a director of no particular critical reputation, especially in the powerful and sly exchange of looks between characters, suggesting much about their psychological relationship (and at its most sinister in the glances between Woods and his mother – the most tantalizingly unresolved suggestion in the movie, although it underlies the character’s truly pathological misogyny). Although deceptively functional in composition at times, much of the film is unnerving with a fine feel for grays, downcast colors, icy veneers and finally, the façade of wealth. Director Flynn often employs a nice fluidity in his camerawork and then cuts away for a jarring sense of disruption, complimenting Dennehy’s need to both avow and disavow his emotional bond to Woods.
Sound
The sound transfer is available in Dolby Digital mono only, perhaps reflecting the film’s unfortunate lack of critical or popular standing. The 1980s score is effective but now rather dated and may seem a distraction as it plays over many dramatic scenes as an obvious and artificial stress. It is a low-key sound mix, fine for an unusual thriller which stresses dialogue and vocal intonation as a means of charting its shifting character relationships. There is much irony, particularly when Woods sings in a bar, and although some details are crisp the transfer is disappointingly flat overall. Background ambience is well sustained in individual locations but it is dialogue and tone of voice (particularly Woods) that really captures the power, ego and one-upmanship between these two characters. Both actors, in a true piece of inspired casting, play off each other adding unpredictability to their scenes together, particularly those when Dennehy finds out about Woods’ role in his own past – a real test to his empathy and sense of self-control. It is what is going on beneath appearances that is equally telling in terms of character revelation in this thoughtful thriller. There are some long silences with mild details suddenly erupting into outbursts of voice and score for a kind of glossy abrasiveness that would have been more impacting with a better transfer but at least the intent of the original sound design is still discernible.
Special Features
The only special feature is a theatrical trailer. On the basis of this film and such other unheralded studies of aberration as Rolling Thunder and Out for Justice, a case can be made for a minor re-appraisal of director John Flynn.
