White Heat a Sizzling James Cagney Gangster Film

 

White Heat (1949)

Directed by Raoul Walsh

Warner Brothers, 114 minutes, not-rated (gangster violence)

★★★★★

 

Cody Loves Ma More than He Loves Virginia Mayo

 

2020 was a bizarre year, so this December, while many Americans were busy with tinsel and colored lights, we went on a film noir binge. Others were singing “White Christmas;” we watched White Heat. I’d say we got the better end of the stick. The American Film Institute ranked White Heat the fourth best gangster film of all-time. Such lists are always contentious, but it’s hard to imagine that anyone would dispute that it deserves to rank high.

 

First, a little background. It stars James Cagney, which seems like a natural–except that in 1949, many considered him a has-been. He was 50-years-old, which was (and is) ancient by Hollywood standards, and his previous four pictures were turkeys that flopped with little notice. Cagney was sick of gangster films and Jack Warner’s greatest desire was that Cagney never again appear in a Warner Brothers picture. Nonetheless, writers Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts thought he’d be good in the lead role of Arthur “Cody” Jarrett and convinced Warner to yield. He did and then contracted with the legendary Raoul Walsh to direct the film. The result is why one should never say “never.”

 

Cagney is riveting as an amoral sociopath. From the opening scene wherein he kills four people on a train to the very end, Cagney’s Cody makes Donald Trump look like Mother Theresa. His performance presaged characters in films such as Psycho, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Usual Suspects. Cody is married to Verna (Virginia Mayo) and has a gang, but the only person he cares about is his mother (Margaret Wycherly). He tops the most-wanted list but, when not suffering crippling migraines, Cody outsmarts his pursuers, including a unique way to avoid a murder rap. Just as investigators think they have the goods on him, he pleads guilty to an Illinois robbery that occurred at the same time. You can’t be in California and Illinois at the same time, right? Cody is willing to pull a few years hard time; it beats the gas chamber.

 

Hank Fallon (Edmond O’Brien) has a job few would rush to take. As a trusted Treasury Department underground investigator, he is assigned to pose as an inmate in the same Illinois penitentiary as Jarrett to collect intelligence and ingratiate himself into Cody’s gang. Cody has plenty of incentive to return to his sanguinary ways after prison. An underling, Big Ed Somers (Steve Cochran), has deposed Cody, taken up with Verna, and tried to engineer his assassination inside the Big House. And Cody goes absolutely psycho when he learns his mother is dead, possibly by Big Ed’s hand.

 

White Heat plays out as a rampage film whose open questions concern Big Ed, Verna, and Hank’s efforts to maintain his disguise before Cody gets wise. The film’s denouement inside a chemical refinery is everything a noir film should be: full of dizzying perspectives, shadows, skewed angles, tension, and surprises. Walsh filmed White Heat in semi-documentary style. That choice, plus Sidney Hickox’s creative cinematography, lend an air of verisimilitude that’s particularly obvious in the prison material and in the film’s closing moments. White Heat’s final scene has been rightly hailed as one of the era’s most impactful. I shall merely observe that Cagney is involved in one of film’s most dramatic exits.

 

I was surprised to learn that Cagney was not nominated for Best Actor for White Heat. He had worthy competition, but who today remembers Richard Todd in The Hasty Heart or Gregory Peck in the overwrought Twelve O’clock High? O’Brien’s performance also warranted an Oscar nod, but he too was overlooked. Mayo is suitably duplicitous, but the most fascinating woman on screen is Margaret Wycherly. You can definitely detect her impact on Estelle Parsons’ take on Blanche Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde.

 

As is always the case with older movies, one must take into account that the values of the past were not those of today. Mayo’s two-bit double-crosser falls into that category. In today’s crime films, there is hell to pay if the female lead isn’t at least a co-conspirator, but Mayo is a stock figure of Hollywood’s Golden Age: a femme fatale who makes bad things happen to others. You need not condone such roles, but you should not expect to see your version of political correctness on the screen.

 

You can deflect your discomfort by watching a different take on the Trojan horse legend. There is also great amusement in experiencing high-tech 1949-style, as police track Cody via a vintage directional finder while triangulating with a protractor and ruler. By any measure, though, White Heat still sizzles.

 

Rob Weir