Pride and Glory, the new NYPD drama starring Colin Farrell, Ed Norton and

Jon Voight, is a hard-hitting story about a family of Irish American cops. CAHIR O'DOHERTY talks to the film's Irish American director Gavin O'Connor about the movie, and growing up in Brooklyn as the son of an Irish American cop.

IN Pride and Glory, which opens nationwide on Friday, October 24, a hardworking Irish American family has to grapple with unforeseen consequences when one of them (Colin Farrell in a welcome return to form) makes a fateful choice that threatens everything they stand for.

The struggle that follows between the heart and head, between protecting your family and protecting the common good, is at the heart of this hard-hitting new police drama.

When crime and corruption come up against what the New York Police Department calls the blue wall of silence - an unwritten honor code that says reporting another police officer's errors or misconduct is an unforgivable personal betrayal - tragedy often follows. The point of the blue wall is to protect cops from criminal proceedings, but as history has shown, that blue wall can sometimes lead to cover-ups of major crimes, too.

"Institutional corruption, whether it's in our government, or on Wall Street, or in Iraq, has been going on a lot lately," says O'Connor during an interview with the Irish Voice.

"And growing up in New York I always heard the expression cops bleed blue, a reference to the so-called blue wall of silence, and so I thought the NYPD was the perfect institution to explore this kind of story in. Pride and Glory is the intimate story of family within the family of the police department itself. I grew up surrounded by it. I know that world well."

At the center of Pride and Glory are two stellar performances from actors Ed Norton and Farrell as two Irish American brothers-in-law who find themselves on either end of the law.

Norton is particularly good as the brave but sensitive detective gradually uncovering a conspiracy that involves his own family. His gritty performance is ably matched by Farrell's, who in the role of well-meaning but thoroughly immoral beat cop has finally found a part that plays to every one of his strengths as an actor.

What's most remarkable about Pride and Glory is how well O'Connor, 44, knows the world he's filming. From the first frame to the last, New York City's mean streets are seen from a seen-it-all-before cop's point of view. This is hardly a surprise, since O'Connor's own father policed these same streets for decades, and his experiences must have rubbed off.

"There's a generational thing I wanted to explore in the film," says O'Connor. "My dad's generation of cops has a code they live by. It's sort of religious in a way.

"They buy into the codes of the department. The next generation - my generation - questioned things a little bit more. That was an interesting collision between us all that we explore in the film."

Not surprisingly the film is dark both in look and content. After all, O'Connor's band of corrupt cops turn out to be willing to do anything to make a fast buck and protect themselves - and not a man, woman or child is safe as their desperation to avoid capture for drug running increases, ratcheting up the terror in this already very tense film.

Much of the power of Pride and Glory comes from the vertigo of knowing that when good cops go bad nothing is ever what it seems. There's real horror in the discovery that the intuitions that are supposed to protect you are putting your life at risk. Good people get caught up in bad events and soon they're transformed for the worse themselves.

Says O'Connor, "I don't think any cop goes into the academy intending to become corrupt. I think that the job and the street can eat away at you. They live in an alternative universe these guys, they see things every day that the real world would find tragic, shocking and heartbreaking. They become immune to things that would startle ordinary people.

"So some cops start justifying and rationalizing these things. Before they know it they're often caught up in a cycle themselves."

In the real world of Brownsville, Brooklyn, O'Connor's father refused to even hear his son consider becoming a cop. ("If I brought up the subject the conversation ended very quickly," O'Connor says.)

His father, O'Connor admits, was ultimately disillusioned about the nobility of the job. Sometimes his high expectations were met, but more often than not they were clobbered.

"In the film Colin Farrell's character thinks Ed Norton's character will provide him with cover for whatever he does," says O'Connor "But Norton's going down a different road and he's not going to do that. What's important to me is that Farrell's character is not just a bad guy, he also loves his wife, he's a wonderful father - a lot of what was motivating him doing the right thing for his family was in a very misguided way."

Farrell's out of control corrupt cop has betrayed Norton's white knight, and now that their cards are finally on the table neither of these cool hands is about to turn the other cheek.

Inevitably their showdown happens in an Irish pub. A lively traditional track begins to blare on the jukebox as they grapple over the pool table and then on the floor. It's not the actors' fault that there are a few rather formulaic scenes like this in an overall very well made drama.

Rather it's a directing choice, and a script choice, and the two leads still do terrific work with the material they've been given. Throughout, there's a distinctly Greek atmosphere hanging over Pride and Glory, where sons do battle with father figures to assert themselves as men.

Jon Voight's glowering turn as the tough Irish patriarch with the heart of a lion is believable, but anachronistic. The fact is that at moments like this Pride and Glory often feels like it was written in the 1970s about the 1970s.

But other sequences feel so modern and urgent they could have been ripped from today's headlines. When good men allow themselves to be blindsided by greed or fear or criminality, things can spin out of control faster than they ever dreamed - that's a lesson that's as fresh today as when Sophocles wrote his first tragedy.

As in Greek drama, women are often underserved in Pride and Glory too, coming in only to break up fights between men, or to scream about the evil men do, but they're rarely given voices of their own. The real struggles of this film play out in the all-male world of brutality and consequence where forgiveness and atonement are never on the menu (Catholicism is notably absent from the film, except for the scene in which a priest buries some cops shot in the line of duty).

The message is that there's no place to run when you've taken the wrong road, and the end of the line is usually six feet deep. Don't miss this powerful new film.