BEST SELLER. Directed by John Flynn; written by Larry Cohen; produced by Carter De Haven for Orion. Starring James Woods and Brian Dennehy. Rated R (violence, language).
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Best Seller is a thriller with more than its fair share of improbabilities, implausibilities and loopholes. But it features a performance (by Woods) that is so compelling that it's worth seeing anyway.
If you can swallow its basic plot idea, then the story of Best Seller is fascinating, too—full of interesting little side-street ideas and uncomfortable notions. But that main idea is a doozy: Big corporations, some of them, anyway, employ hit men to get rid of people the boss finds troublesome ... a la The Godfather. On top of that, when one of these self-styled executives is fired, he's free to run around spreading stories of the murders he committed for his former employer.
Meechum (Dennehy) is a veteran cop who has an interesting second job—he writes crime novels. He's been pretty successful at it, too, until lately, when he's out of inspiration and has missed several of his publisher's deadlines. Cleve (Woods) would also be a fun guest on "What's My Line," since he is the gentleman described above: until recently, he was in charge of "eliminating liabilities and protecting assets" for Kappa International, a huge corporation.
Angered at being fired after years of faithful service, he sets upon a unique method of revenge. He'll confess details of all his Kappa crimes to Meechum, who will write a best seller exposing its head honcho (played with somewhat more sleeze than necessary by Paul Shenar), whom the world believes is a generous philanthropist with a heart of gold.
Implausible as it is, you can immediately see the dramatic possibilities of such a set-up; cop and killer working together, two men who have killed, but who look at killing in radically different ways. The suave, well-dressed, intelligent hit man, longing for a more conventional kind of respect, and even admiration, tries to win sympathetic treatment for himself from the upright cop who would really rather bust him than write about him—at least at first.
No one can give psychopathology a human face like Woods can. Totally repulsed by Cleve at first, we gradually begin to experience more complicated feelings for him. Not ever really the affection or respect he craves, but maybe at least a kind of acceptance of his membership with us in the human race, something unthinkable at the beginning of the movie. And all of this without ever really understanding him, or what makes him the way he is.
Moviegoers aren't used to seeing Dennehy upstaged. Usually it is he who steals the scenes, and sometimes the whole movie. But, although a few of the scenes feature a give-and-take that's balanced enough, most of Best Seller belongs to Woods. Never mind that Meechum is a more understandable, likeable character. It's Cleve we want to watch.
Given Best Seller 's storyline, viewers would naturally expect to see a good bit of violence. But a surprisingly large percentage of the murders, etc., are only talked about or are shown off-screen. Those we do see are usually crisp and businesslike; no reveling in violence for its own sake here.
October 21, 1987