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White Heat (1949)
Review Copyright Roger Zotti,
2005
By 1948, James Cagney star power had diminished. He needed a strong vehicle to bring him back into the limelight. White Heat (1949) was his ticket back. Of his performance, Bosley Crowther wrote, "…as the ruthless gang-leader in this furious and frightening account of train-robbery, prison-break, gang war, and gun fighting with the police, Mr. Cagney achieves the fascination of a brilliant bullfighter at work, deftly engaged in the business of doing violence with economy and grace."
Cagney portrays psychotic gangster Cody Jarrett. Most of the time he has little feeling for how he treats people. At one point, his wife Verna (Virginia Mayo) tries to sit down and he kicks the chair out from under her. Later, watch how gets even with member of his gang, Big Ed Somers (Steve Cochran).
He's not loyal to his men, either. One of his men, badly burned during a train robbery, has now become a hindrance to Jarrett and his gang. Gnawing on a chicken leg, Jarrett shoots him.
As for the performances, Mayo's tough talking moll is proof that she can do more than sing and dance. The always reliable Edmund O'Brien does a stellar job as a Federal agent Hank Fallon. Posing as an inmate, Fallon, now called Vic Pardo, befriends Jarrett and becomes a member of Jarrett's gang.
Jarrett's mother (Margaret Wycherly) is modeled on Ma Barker. She's just as tough and wacky as her son. Cagney suggested to director Raoul Walsh that in one scene, after Jarrett has an epileptic-like seizure, he should sit in his mother's lap and seek comfort. The Freudian touch appealed to Walsh. It added depth to the film and is one of its most memorable moments.
What to Watch for: In jail, Jarrett learns that his mother is dead. Cagney's challenge was to stage a breakdown without dialogue. It occurs in the prison mess hall, where he goes crazy. The scene, which was done in one take, has a history: "Cagney asked the writers [Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts] how far they wanted him to go," writes Frank Miller. They told him to try to make the viewers' spines tingle. "As a child," Miller continues, "Cagney had visited a mental institution in Ward's Island in the East River and had been deeply affected by the cries of the insane. Once the cameras started rolling, he drew on those memories so well that some of the extras thought he really had gone mad."
Near the end of the film, Jarrett is cornered by the T-men in an oil refinery. Laughing hysterically, he climbs to the top of a gas tanks. Suffice it to say that the final scene, like so much of the film, is indeed explosive.
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