Dennehy Wears a New ‘Badge of Honor’

Mention the quality of feature films being made by Hollywood these days and Brian Dennehy gets a mischievous twinkle in his eyes.

“The thing that’s nice about TV these days is that you are able to explore a lot of modern circumstances in a fairly realistic way,” says the 54-year-old veteran of such hit films as “10,” “Cocoon,” “Silverado,” “F/X” and “Presumed Innocent.”

“The movie business has gotten progressively weirder,” Dennehy says.

So weird, he says, that the “movie business is now concentrating on re-creating TV shows out of TV’s wasteland days--’The Flintstones,’ ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ and ‘The Fugitive.’ Even if they are good movies, they are absolutely pure diversion. They don’t even pretend to be anything else. And that includes ‘Jurassic Park’ and, frankly, that includes ‘The Firm’ and ‘A Few Good Men.’ ”

Though “A Few Good Men” was nominated for the best-picture Oscar, Dennehy wasn’t impressed. “It has all the political and moral relevance of a movie that was made 26 years ago,” he explains over lunch at a Marina Del Rey eatery.

“It doesn’t mean anything in the context of today,” adds Dennehy, a former Marine who fought in the Vietnam War. “A Marine officer who presides over a killing in his platoon would be sent so far back into the boondocks he’d never be heard of again. Of course, it’s a serious picture compared to the ‘Addams Family 2.’ ”

Dennehy may put those pictures down, but he doesn’t rule out doing them.

“I’d be the first one to be in any of those movies because I would love to get the checks and would love to be able to work three months a year,” he says, smiling. “I ain’t going to be in one. That’s the way it is.”

Over the last few years, television has afforded Dennehy the opportunity to play diverse, meaty roles that don’t exist for him as a character actor in movies. Roles such as serial murderer John Wayne Gacy in “To Catch a Killer,” for which he received an Emmy nomination, and labor union leader Jackie Presser in HBO’s “The Jackie Presser Story.”

“Jackie Presser alone--that is one of the best parts I have ever had,” Dennehy says, diving into his broiled chicken. “Not that anybody watched it. I am going to say something that I am going to get in trouble for, but I think it was better than (HBO’s) ‘Citizen Cohn’ or ‘Stalin.’ ”

He’s also pleased with his latest project: “Jack Reed: A Badge of Honor,” premiering Friday on “NBC’s Friday Mystery Movie.” A year ago, Dennehy played the real-life Chicago cop in the popular NBC miniseries “Deadly Matrimony.”

In this week’s outing, Reed is working on a murder case when he discovers a larger plot by a brilliant sociopath out to hijack arms. Reed learns the hijacker also is involved in a murder but is hampered in his investigation by the federal witness protection program.

Dennehy finds Reed an interesting character to portray and to know. “I spent time with him,” he says. “I liked him a lot.” What Dennehy has attempted to do with the Jack Reed character--”with mixed results”--is to capture the dilemma the real Reed has to deal with every day.

“Jack Reed is intelligent, educated and religious, a philosopher type of guy who, as a cop, lives on the edge in an essentially morally ambivalent and ambiguous world.”

A world, Dennehy says, where there is no right or wrong. “Morality and right and wrong are subjective, not objective. If there are no rules, how are you supposed to enforce the rules? The dilemma multiplies by the fact that here is a guy who believes in a certain set of doctrines, certainly for himself and for his family. How can a person like Jack Reed handle himself with his set of attitudes, his set of beliefs? In the most recent one, he has to struggle with his instinct to destroy this guy who is unabashedly evil and embraces evil.”

Dennehy may be doing more “Jack Reed” movies for NBC this season. But this month he flies to Vancouver to begin production on a one-hour ABC weekly series entitled “Birdland.”

“I might be on two networks at the same time,” Dennehy says. “Birdland,” he says, is about a psychiatrist who runs a big-city welfare hospital.

“ABC has bought six (episodes). We will see how it goes. It’s a midseason replacement, which means it goes in a slot which somebody has already been blown out of. So its prognosis is not good.”

Dennehy is taking time out of his busy schedule right now to spend time with his new baby boy, whom he and his wife Jennifer adopted the night of the Emmys (Sept. 19). “His name is Cormac,” he says with a smile. “He is named after writer Cormac McCarthy.”

And the proud papa says the newest Dennehy is a “terrific kid. He’s an Irish kid. When he was born he was 9 pounds, 6 ounces with red hair. This kid is moving right to cereal very quickly. He wants a hamburger right now.”

If Dennehy has anything to do with it, Cormac will be a sportsman. “I would love to see him learn golf and tennis,” he says. “Gentleman sports. Skill sports. I would like him to be an intellectual, an academic.”

Dennehy starts laughing. “By the time he gets up to that age, I will be in a wheelchair with a tube in my nose. So I won’t have too much effect.”

“Jack Reed: A Badge of Honor” airs Friday at 9 p.m. on NBC.