Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.5

Best Seller Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson September 12, 2024

MGM's Blu-ray release of John Flynn's BEST SELLER (1987) has effectively replaced Olive Films' BD-25, which is out of print. In English, with optional English SDH. Region free.

In Michael Doyle's interview book, Larry Cohen: The Stuff of Gods and Monsters (BearManor Media, 2015), Larry Cohen explains in considerable length the genesis of Best Seller and his reaction to the finished film. Cohen recalls that the picture took about seven or eight years to get produced. After Cohen's script was passed from one film company to another, Orion Pictures bought it and made the movie. Cohen originally intended Best Seller as a project for Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas and actually wrote his screenplay with the two actors in mind. When Orion and director John Flynn chose Brian Dennehy and James Woods for the leads, Cohen remembers he had no gripes and regards both performances as "good." Cohen doesn't mention that he likely took his inspiration for Dennehy's character from Joseph Wambaugh, the Los Angeles detective sergeant who also became a popular writer of true crime books and successful novelist of fictional detective works. In fact, James Woods previously appeared in three film adaptations of Wambaugh's books: The Choirboys (1977), The Onion Field (1979), and The Black Marble (1980).

Best Seller opens in 1972 with a van traveling to the Los Angeles Police Department Evidence Warehouse. Figures cloaked in black and wearing Richard Nixon masks confront LAPD officers guarding the safe. A couple policemen are shot and Officer Dennis Meechum (Brian Dennehy), who fights back against the assailants, is wounded but survives. The thieves run off with the money. The narrative flash-forwards by fifteen years at a time when Meechum is now a detective working the docks in LA undercover. Meechum is chasing a criminal but his life becomes in peril until a man trailing them steps in to shoot Meechum's target. Meechum later learns that this "hero" is Cleve (James Woods), an arrogant and smooth-talking fixer. Cleve has been following Meechum's police work and literary career. He knows that Meechum has not published a book in about four years since his wife died of cancer. Unbeknown to Meechum, Cleve has already become friendly with his teenage daughter, Holly Meechum (Allison Balson). Cleve offers Meechum a deal to help him write a book about Cleve's former boss, the wealthy industrialist David Madlock (Paul Shenar). Cleve claims that he used to work for Madlock and murdered anyone who became a liability to his boss. In addition, Cleve says he has firsthand knowledge of the 1972 robbery, which Madlock masterminded and used the loot to fund his multinational corporation, Kappa Industries. Madlock fired Cleve because the latter wanted a stake of the Kappa empire. (Cleve's partnership and later breakup with Madlock is not probed or explored enough.) Meechum is at first skeptical to the veracity of Cleve's stories but remains interested because he wants to discover the perpetrators behind the raid at the LAPD evidence depository. Best Seller develops into an unconventional buddy picture.

Let's collaborate on a book together.

In his interviews with Michael Doyle, Cohen believes that one of the producers eliminated a romantic subplot between Meechum and Roberta Gillian (Victoria Tennant), who is Meechum's literary agent and publisher. Cohen explains that Orion may have thought Dennehy's girth was an inhibitor for audiences believing that Meechum could have a romance with Gillian. Cohen says he wrote additional scenes with those two characters that were later deleted. Kathleen Carroll, the film critic in 1987 for the Daily (NY) News, must have had a reliable source at the time because she wrote that Gillian is "supposed to be Meechum’s love interest, [which] was all but cut out of the film." This lack of character development is one of Best Seller's main weaknesses. The other is the climax, which Cohen lambastes in Doyle's book. Cohen does not identify producer Carter DeHaven by name but he urged the production to make at least one change to the last five minutes. Cohen recollects being flabbergasted that his suggestions were not honored when he saw the ending for the first time at the Loews Theatre in New York. The boisterous reaction from the audience that Cohen sat with was not unlike the one Miami Herald film critic Bill Cosford heard at a preview screening: "'This is so stupid,' came the happy cry toward the end." I also have issues with the climatic sequence but don't want to spoil them for those who haven't seen Best Seller which, in spite of its flaws, is a brazenly funny action movie.

Best Seller Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

MGM's transfer most likely derives from the same master that my colleague Jeff Kauffman wrote about in 2015. The picture appears in its original theatrical exhibition ratio of 1.85:1 on this MPEG-4 AVC-encoded BD-25. Colors are reasonably well-defined throughout the presentation. Textures are solid and grain is stable. There are periodic print markings on the transfer. For example, see the fleck in the upper left of Screenshot #9. MGM has encoded the feature at an average video bitrate of 23000 kbps. (Olive's standard bitrate is slightly higher at 27997 kbps.)

The 95-minute film receives eleven chapters from MGM. These can be accessed via remote only.

Best Seller Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

MGM has supplied a DTS-HD Master Audio Dual Mono track (2046 kbps, 24-bit). Please note that this is indeed a monaural mix. I didn't notice any ambience or surround activity on the rear channels. I'm not quite as high on the audio as Jeff is. I felt the dialogue seemed a little muffled at times. Some of the gunshot f/x show their age. Still, the master is in fine condition with the track delivering an authentic rendition of the original mono.

The chief addition to this release is the optional English subtitles, which are lacking on the Olive Films disc. Please see Screenshot #s 18-22 for how the subtitles appear when switched on. Their placement across the frame is odd in a few spots. For example, notice how the words to a sentence are separated and spaced out in #22.

Best Seller Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The MGM disc has no extras. The Olive has a trailer in SD.

Best Seller Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

If you didn't pick up Olive Films' release of Best Seller, then you'll want to get this BD from MGM (albeit a bare bones). The transfer and lossless mono mix are essentially the same. It's nice, however, that MGM has added subtitles as an option. James Woods is the reason to see the film and own the Blu-ray. A SOLID RECOMMENDATION.