D:
John Flynn. P: Carter DeHaven (Hemdale Film Corporation). W: Larry Cohen. Ph: Fred
Murphy. M: Jay Ferguson. St: James Woods (Cleve), Brian Dennehy (Dennis
Meechum), Victoria Tennant (Roberta Gillian), Allison Balson (Holly Meechum),
Paul Shenar (David Madlock)
“Anybody can kill anybody, even the
president”
It’s
1972. A three-man crew in Nixon masks hits a police depository building. Two
cops die. The third, Meechum, is left for dead but wounds the bandits’ leader.
“You have balls of steel my friend,” he says in admiration.
Fifteen
years pass. Meechum has written a successful book about the hold-up, but
struggled to follow it up. He’s also a widowed father with a teenage daughter,
and he’s weary of police work – yes, he’s “getting too old for this shit”. Enter
Cleve, a smooth professional hitman, with a proposition: he’ll divulge his murderous
deeds on behalf of respected businessman David Madlock, who has now cast Cleve
aside, for Meechum to weave into another bestseller – and bring Madlock down.
At
once quintessential and subversive, Best
Seller tweaks the template of the Eighties buddy movie, folding in elements
of film noir – the symbiosis of cop and killer – and Seventies conspiracy
thrillers. Cleve’s insistence that he and Meechum are forged from the same
material is a notion the latter refuses to entertain, and is not something the
script really gets to grips with. Meechum needs a lot of convincing that this
shady stranger is on the level and stays guarded, hostile, even though Cleve
twice saves his life in the early stages. Only when Cleve reveals that Madlock
ordered the depository job – on which Cleve was the shooter – is Meechum’s
interest truly piqued. But he remains a straight arrow, and relatively undeveloped;
if he has a dark side, it is not something actor, writer or director chooses to
explore.
More
pointed are Cohen’s barbs against big business and ill-gotten capital gains, with
Cleve puncturing Meechum’s Joe Average assertion that “corporations don’t have
people killed”. As for Madlock, the philanthropist with blood on his
hands, much of it shed by Cleve, his former employee calls him “the history of
America incarnate”, a robber baron for the modern age. Although Flynn keeps
them in check, Cohen’s satirical sensibilities give the script a sharp edge
that has barely blunted with age.
Dennehy
is as solid as ever as the harried midlife cop, but his character is very much a
passenger, steered towards full comprehension by both Cleve and the narrative. Cohen
uses Meechum’s scepticism about Cleve’s revelations to fuel developments,
taking them from the site of one ‘accidental death’ after another –
magistrates, politicians – via evidence dumps and violent encounters with
Madlock’s henchmen, even a revelatory sojourn at Cleve’s idyllic family home.
Eventually the detective is forced by an accumulation of corroborating
circumstances to accept what his collaborator is telling him.
Above
all the film is a podium for Woods to exhibit his singular gifts, imbuing an
insidious, sociopathic assassin with fiendish intelligence and his customary nervous
energy, crafting a character capable of murdering without compunction, yet
desirous of respect and affection. Cleve doesn’t lack for charm and cynical
humour, not least when disdaining Madlock’s minions (“Where does David find you
people?”), but also bristles with barely suppressed emotional instability – Woods’
speciality. “Am I sympathetic?” Cleve hisses to Meechum’s publisher (Madsen) while
caressing her with a knife, anxious about how he’s coming across in the
manuscript, adding egoism and insecurity to his casebook of neuroses.
This
need for approval assumes an almost juvenile dimension in his relationship with
Meechum. Cleve views the detective as a friend but is diagnosed as “an
aberration, a freak” in return. When Meechum rejects an inscribed watch as a
gift, Cleve’s disappointment plays as genuine. Woods’ ability to furnish even a
sadomasochist with vulnerability – this is a man who burns his palms with
cigarettes as an exercise in willpower – makes for a winning contrast with Dennehy’s
all-round robustness.
Best Seller shares the same taut storytelling as Flynn’s
other noir-influenced crime films, The Outfit (1973) and Rolling Thunder (1977), although Eighties aesthetics soften the rough edges to an extent, Cohen’s
script throwing its would-be antihero a redemptive lifebelt in the third act.
Nevertheless, it is brawnier, and darker in tone, than its best-known
counterpart, Lethal Weapon, released
the same year, which blurred the cop/psycho dynamic by condensing the elements
into one character. Not for Woods an arsenal of loose-cannon mannerisms; just a
palpable sense of pure volatility, a killer who takes perverse pride in his
work and expects approbation for his backhanded contribution to the American
dream. Kevin Grant
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