The Strength of the Righteous

Men. Strong men. Men with a code. Men who will walk into a dark room with just the courage of their convictions, ideally with an orchestra gearing up behind them. You know the type.

It just so happens that Arrow has released a whole bunch of movies about that kind of person over the last few months, across a variety of genres. And today I’m rounding them all up.

For example: Remember Narc? The bad-cop, worse-cop movie with Jason Patric and Ray Liotta that marked the arrival of high-octane filmmaker Joe Carnahan? It’s full of those guys!

I am being reductive. For all of its nervous energy and saturated imagery, Narc is a pretty solid policier, with Patric playing Nick Tellis, an undercover cop haunted by a shooting that went bad whose investigation into the death of a deep-cover comrade leads him to the extremely twitchy Lieutenant Henry Oak (Ray Liotta), who’s clearly hiding something.

Willed into existence by Liotta, who shared an agent with Carnahan and was very tired of playing generic cops and villain a decade after GoodFellas, Narc turned out to be a showcase for everyone in its cast, not just its producer-star; everybody in this movie comes out swinging, the result of Carnahan’s all-in directorial style, though Liotta and Patric easily get the lion’s share of memorable shout-downs and dirty looks.

Moreover, the film feels real in a weirdly cinematic way – unrehearsed, messy, desperate. The chases are awkward, the fights feel panicked. And the fact that most of the picture was shot in Toronto means we get to see a very early appearance by Karen Robinson, now a regular fixture in cop shows like Pretty Hard Cases and Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent. That’s neat.

Narc fans – Carnaheads? – will be happy to learn Arrow has commissioned fresh extras in the two years since Australia’s Via Vision gave the film the special-edition treatment in the second volume of the After Dark Neo-Noir Cinema Collection.

Arrow’s set features a new introduction from Carnahan on the feature disc (which also contains his 2003 DVD commentary with editor John Gilroy) and an hour’s worth of new interviews with Carnahan, co-star Krista Bridges, cinematographer Alex Nepomniaschy and costume designer Gersha Phillips on the supplemental Blu-ray.

The featurettes from that original Paramount DVD are also there, along with several hours of raw EPK interviews with Carnahan, Nepomniaschy, producer Diane Nabatoff, co-stars Patric and Liotta and William Friedkin (aww), whose enthusiastic support of the picture helped crown Carnahan as the next big thing in hard-boiled action movies. Game recognize game, as the kids say.

As it happens, Arrow recently released another story of an old pro teaching a youngster the ropes, albeit in a very different arena. That’d be Anthony Mann’s 1957 Western The Tin Star, starring Henry Fonda and Anthony Perkins as two men with very different perspectives on justice: Fonda’s Morg Hickman is a bounty hunter who won’t hesitate to pull his gun on an villain, while Perkins’ Ben Owens is a newly appointed sheriff uncertain about the best way to wield his authority – which his girl Millie (Mary Webster) is worried will get him killed. Can these two find a middle ground in the lawless West, or must all good men ultimately turn to violence?

You may already have gleaned the answer, given the genre, but Mann makes it feel like a surprise just the same. And the contrast between Fonda’s laconic calm and Perkins’ twitchy physicality makes it feel like Ben might accidentally shoot Morg, or himself, at any given moment. (I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn Andrew Garfield studied Perkins very closely for Under the Silver Lake.)

Perkins’ subsequent career also informs his performance here in really interesting ways, with the sense that Ben’s anxiety might apply to a whole lot of other things in his life, not the lawman thing. I’d never given the movie much thought, honestly, but Arrow’s disc – which doesn’t appear to be a full-on restoration, but looks very nice – was most welcome.

Supplements are modest, but very good. An audio commentary by author and genre aficionado Toby Roan offers plenty of historical and critical context; “Apprenticing a Master” finds author and critic Neil Sinyard going deep on Mann’s artistry and his specific flair for Westerns, and “Beyond the Score” lets Peter Bernstein, son of Elmer, discuss his father’s score. The disc also throws in the theatrical trailer and a trio of still galleries.

And if we’re talking about buried treasures, Arrow’s Blu-ray of Murphy’s War earlier this year certainly qualifies. I’d always dismissed it as one of the movies Peter O’Toole made in his “I AM WILD-EYED AND SHOUTING AND YOU SHALL LOVE ME FOR IT” period – which is to say, the entirety of the 1970s and some of the ’80s – but I’d never actually seen it. Having finally caught up to it, I am happy to say the shouting is the point.

Written by Stirling Silliphant not long after he won his Oscar for In the Heat of the Night, and directed by Peter Yates – who was hot off Bullitt – Murphy’s War is an unapologetically eccentric Moby Dick riff, with O’Toole starring as a traumatized merchant marine obsessed with finding and destroying the U-boat that sunk his ship and slaughtered his crewmates, leaving him the sole survivor. With the war winding down, Murphy is determined to get revenge for the massacre, even teaching himself to fly a biplane to hunt the sub in Venezuela’s Orinoco River.

It is a very weird movie, even considering the New Hollywood wave that was rolling through the studios at the time. O’Toole’s Murphy (who is, yes, wild-eyed and shouting) is presented as a charming but clearly unbalanced hero: His desire to avenge his friends might have been genuine at one point, but now it’s just the way he justifies his crusade, and the further violence it provokes. O’Toole is exactly the sort of actor you want to play a man with no conscience and no remaining scruples; even bedraggled and screaming, his charisma is enough to get us to believe people would follow him into Hell, even when it’s one he’s created himself.

Murphy’s War was largely dismissed at the time, but it’s aged beautifully; O’Toole’s performance lines up beautifully with his frantic, despairing work in Man of La Mancha and The Stunt Man and even My Favorite Year, and Yates goes hard on the futility and misery of Murphy’s war, steering the film towards an ending that feels both exactly right for a Vietnam-era war movie and also the only place this story can go. I am slightly embarrassed that I didn’t discover this film sooner.

Arrow’s disc supplements the feature a new visual essay about the film by critic David Cairns, as well as an hour of interviews with assistant director John Glen, focus puller Robin Vidgeon and critic Sheldon Hall that first appeared on the UK Indicator release in 2022, a trailer and an image gallery.

Want to see another movie star chase his own tail? Check out Night Falls on Manhattan, a film I’ve been meaning to revisit ever since going through the Sidney Lumet box set released by Via Vision earlier this year. A second volume has been teased, but Lumet’s 1996 courtroom drama – starring Andy Garcia as a newly appointed ADA handed a contentious murder case – is unlikely to be in there, as Via Vision had already released it as one of their very first Imprint releases.

I never got my hands on that disc, but Arrow’s new Blu is a massive improvement on my old Paramount DVD; mastered from a new 4K scan (but restored at 2K, for reasons Arrow leaves unexplained), it finds more depth and detail in David Watkin’s cinematography, which often has a delicacy that differentiates this film from other Lumet NYPD movies like Serpico, Prince of the City and Q&A. It’s tonier, if that makes any sense, and this disc captures that nicely.

Extras are entirely archival – two commentary tracks from the Paramount disc, EPK interviews with Lumet, Garcia and co-stars Lena Olin, Richard Dreyfuss, Ian Holm and Ron Leibman, and the Lumet episode of the 2002 documentary series The Directors – but trust me, you’ll be picking this up for the movie. I know Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead has a following, but I’ve always considered this one Lumet’s last good picture, and maybe the best thing he did after Running on Empty.

Lumet’s script – adapted from Prince of the City author Robert Daley’s novel Tainted Evidence – is structured as a series of arguments, which was his strongest suit as a storyteller; he knew how to square actors off in a frame, and his cast (which also includes James Gandolfini, Colm Feore, Paul Guilfoyle and a baby-faced Bobby Cannavale) was there to work. It’s barely remembered now, mostly because it’s been out of circulation for so long; hopefully this release leads people to rediscover it.

One little note, in case you followed the links: The Tin Star and the 4K edition of Narc are both listed as out of stock at Arrow’s site but you can still find them at most retailers; in Canada they’re both readily available – and on sale! – at Unobstructed View.

Narc is now available in separate 4K and Blu-ray editions, and The Tin Star, Murphy’s War and Night Falls on Manhattan are all available now on Blu-ray, all from Arrow Video. Because they care.