Year: 1949
Runtime: 114 min
Director: Raoul Walsh
Starring: James Cagney, Virginia Mayo, Edmond O’Brien, Margaret Wycherly, Steve Cochran
In a bygone era, the gangster film occupied the niche now held by superhero movies, that of the rather mindless action film that has the thinnest veneer of social significance. The superhero adventures provide thrills for mass consumption. And the gangster film provided the same kind of thrills for audiences from the 1930s through the 1950s.
Breezy good fun with a lot of shootouts and car chases, always tempered with a morally appropriate ending that reminds us that crime does not pay, no matter how cool it might look.
And nobody looked cooler committing crime than James Cagney.
White Heat marks a return to those gangster roles he feared would end up typecasting him for the rest of his career and this is maybe his greatest role in the genre. I won’t call it his greatest film role because, c’mon, this is James freaking Cagney, but in terms of hard-boiled criminal types, you won’t often get a better on-screen depiction than here.
Playing Cody Jarrett, Cagney is a force to be reckoned with, a ticking time bomb counting down to annihilation. And as the fuse is lit, you soon realize it won’t be a matter of if he explodes, but when, and who he will take down with him.
Jarrett is the leader of a group of dangerous stick-up men, and their latest heist has left one of their own for dead and a train with a neat little collection of dead bodies and a missing payroll. The heat is on and Jarrett decides to cop a plea for a different crime to do some light time. Yeah, go figure, I don’t know too many criminals who decide to lie low by getting arrested, but it was a different era. He figures on serving his shortened sentence, coming back to his wife, and going right back into the wild and wacky world of a murderous bank robber.
However, a new prisoner, played by Edmond O’Brien, complicates his plans somewhat by being an undercover cop. He wants to get Jarrett to confess to the robbery and murders at the start of the film, and to do that he needs to get in tight with the little psychopath. Soon, both men have broken out of prison and Jarrett starts upping the body count by planning another heist and gunning for his traitorous partner.
There’s nothing revolutionary about the story in White Heat. But it’s the stellar performances and masterful direction from Raoul Walsh make this an intensely compelling picture. No one delivers a dud performance here, with standouts being Cagney (naturally) and Margaret Wycherly as his mother.
It’s hard to imagine anyone upstaging Cagney in the fine art of being devious, but Wycherly gives him a run for his money. Ma Jarrett is just as cold, calculating, and deadly as her son, and Wycherly provides us a vivid image of a frail little old homebody with an inner core of iron. She’d as soon stick a knife in your gut as bake you an apple pie. I only wish she had been in more of the movie.
But make no mistake, even with a strong supporting cast, this is still Cagney’s vehicle. He plays the maladjusted momma’s boy as a furious control freak that solves every problem with sudden violence. And oh boy, is it entrancing to watch! The beginning of the movie is a little disappointing, though the train robbery is action-packed and serves a good jumping on point to all the main characters, but once we get inside the prison and O’Brien meets Cagney, the tension starts to build.
Raoul Walsh’s ability to continually add to the intensity of each scene, like a winding staircase constructed of impending doom, makes the whole film feel like a bowstring being drawn taut. As betrayal after betrayal mounts, and everyone tries to hide their life-or-death secrets, all it will take is a single twitch and that string will snap. It’s a terrific house of cards just waiting to collapse.
And when it does…wow, it does not do so lightly. The finale is absolutely explosive, with flying lead chasing after those final revelations.
The movie also looks good with solid cinematography from Sidney Hickox, especially the prison scenes, which feel massive and almost dystopic in their sprawling walls of concrete and identically dressed inmates moving about listlessly. Hickox knew his way around moody flicks, as he worked on The Big Sleep and To Have and to Have Not, both directed by Howard Hawks. I’d hesitate to call this a true film noir, but there are enough scenes to make me recommend this to lovers of the genre, with a couple standouts being a complete mental breakdown in the prison cafeteria, filmed with a grandiose sense of scale and presented with wild depth from Cagney, and then the gloomy approach to an old farm house, where a man waits inside for a killer to invade. These are standouts in a movie packed to the brim with such scenes.
The only real downside to the movie is its insistence on showcasing police procedure. Yeah, the first time we watch police radio cars triangulate a signal to track down our wanted man, it’s kind of neat, but the second and third time? It just gets dull. And that’s one of the flaws with most of these gangster movies—the heroes are portrayed in a far less interesting light than the villains.
Edmond O’Brien is a fine actor but his character could best be summed up as plain toast in a jumpsuit. Especially compared to the erratic Cagney. And that’s a fate forced upon all the “good guy” characters in the movie. Only the villains get the most interesting treatment. Virginia Mayo and Steve Cochran shine as Cody Jarrett’s unfaithful wife and backstabbing partner respectively.
Mayo puts the fatale in femme fatale. Her abusive relationship with Cody is one that she can’t seem to escape, no matter how much she lies or who she has to hurt, somehow she finds herself forced to fawn over the lethal little gangster or risk his very brutal wrath. Mayo somehow manages to be both faintly sympathetic and also just as awful as the rest of the criminals. Takes some skill to pull off that combo.
White Heat is a fun, exciting movie with fantastic acting. It has plenty of action, countless close-calls, and an ending that left me breathless until the final frame. It’s a good introduction to James Cagney for those who have yet to enjoy one of his movies and because it has an ageless sort of plot it won’t feel too dated for modern sensibilities.
Is it top of the world? Pretty damn close.
