James Cagney, Virginia Mayo, Edmond
O'Brien, Steve Cochran, Margaret Wycherly
Directed by
Raoul Walsh
1949 • 114 min • Not rated
(non-graphic violence)
In later years, James Cagney regarded White Heat with a combination
of pride and regret; while satisfied with his own performance,
he tended to dismiss the picture as a "cheap melodrama." Seen
today, White Heat
stands as one of the classic crime films of the 1940s,
containing perhaps Cagney's best bad-guy
portrayal. The star plays criminal mastermind Cody Jarrett,
a mother-dominated psychotic who dreams of being on "top
of the world." Inadvertently leaving clues behind
after a railroad heist, Jarrett becomes the target of the
feds, who send an undercover agent (played by Edmond O'Brien)
to infiltrate the Jarrett gang. While Jarrett sits in prison
on a deliberately trumped-up charge (he confesses to one
crime to provide himself an alibi for the railroad robbery),
he befriends O'Brien, who poses as a hero-worshipping hood
who's always wanted to work with Jarrett. Busting out of
prison with O'Brien, Jarrett regroups his gang to mastermind
a "Trojan horse" armored-car robbery.—Hal
Erickson, All Movie Guide
James
Cagney made his name on screen as a criminal, and he gave his
last truly great outlaw
performance in White
Heat, which may well be the most intelligent and striking work
of his career. While Cagney always knew how to lend his characters
a charismatic menace, his Cody Jarrett in White Heat is both
menacing and uncomfortably bizarre. Given to strange semi-epileptic
seizures, sudden bursts of horrible violence, and a bizarre
attachment to his mother that stops just short of incest, Cody
represents the criminal as head case, at once fascinating and
disturbingly unstable. Cagney manages to lend Cody just
enough of his
traditional tough-talking, wise guy veneer that he seems
like a conventional screen criminal at first, but it
doesn't
take long
for Cody to reveal himself as a full-blown psychotic,
and the perversely self-immolating "Made it, Ma! Top of
the world!" finale is only the most spectacular symptom
of his madness. Raoul Walsh's direction is hardly as audacious
as Cagney's performance, but it is crisp, efficient, and briskly
paced, and in a way Cagney's portrayal may well be all the
more effective in this context. While White Heat's narrative
often seems like the traditional story of a charismatic bad
guy who will be forced to pay for his crimes in the last reel,
it instead houses a different and most puzzling sort of villain,
who paved the way for the stranger, more brutal outlaws who
would dominate crime cinema in the 1960s and 1970s.—Mark
Deming, All
Movie
Guide
