(1949)

Starring James Cagney, Edmond O'Brien, Virginia Mayo; dir: Raoul Walsh

In the end it’s all Cagney, but the compressed punk energy he brings to White Heat is matched slug-for-slug by the direction, the writing, the acting and even Max Steiner’s music. White Heat is remorseless - a succession of switchbacks, reverses and cliffhangers that grab you by the throat and never let go!

Cagney’s Cody Jarrett character here amps up the gangster archetypes he pioneered in the thirties with an overlay of psychotic mother love that’s downright weird - and dangerous. John McCarty, in his collection Thrillers, rightly sees White Heat as a crucial bridge between the original Depression-era hoods and those criminals an infinitely more complex postwar world would summon up, making it no less than a "cinematic history of the crime thriller’s own evolution".

After his 1942 Oscar winning turn as song and dance man George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy, Cagney’s elevation seemed assured. But an ensuing string of flops with his own production company forced his return to Warners. Taking no chances on their errant star’s ‘comeback’ vehicle, the studio insisted on a star turn building on his proven Public Enemy and G-Men persona.

"The mug to end all mugs" said Cagney himself of Jarrett, his choice of terms illustrating how begrudging was his return to a skin he’d tried to shed for a decade. (Ironically just a year later he would revisit the formula in the disappointing Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, giving such a reptilian performance as another psychotic hood that it was obvious he was so tired of the style that he could only get through by sending it up.)

The 1930s gangster archetypes seemed positively straightshooting in an inward-looking world post-Hitler and the Holocaust, and in this climate White Heat let rip: the raw Oedipal pulp of Jarrett’s mother-dependency, the corresponding infantilism of his marriage (to a scheming Virginia Mayo, brilliantly played), the oddly avuncular quality of the Jarrett-Edmond O’Brien relationship, the brutally suppressed dysfunctional family that is the gang on the run, the brain-drilling headaches and the ruthless dispatch of anyone that gets in the way.

Rather than the oft-cited prison scene where Cody wigs out after hearing the news of his Ma, I think all these key touchstones are seen in sharpest relief in the scene where a headache cripples Jarrett in their hideaway and all the insane forces at work coalesce, not least being Ma’s advice on when to return: "No, not yet, Son. Don't let 'em see you like that. Might give some of 'em ideas."

An intriguing line of conjecture to this warped maternal ‘relationship’ emerges from the historical backtracking through the film’s development revealed in Velvet Light Trap (#11). In its Some Thoughts On Fifties Gangster Films, Richard Whitehall goes back to White Heat’s original story by Virginia Kellogg (who also contributed the original story for Anthony Mann’s T-Men) to excavate the original conception for Edmond O’Brien’s undercover Fed role. This was to have been no less than a father/son team of agents, cast accordingly! When this complication was streamlined into the one (Edmond O’Brien) role, one can’t help but wonder if the germ of an idea (to include a parental dimension) hadn’t already been cemented…

(A word here for the thankless role noir stalwart Edmond O’Brien essays in White Heat. We are captivated by Cagney’s larger-than-life lunacy, but what makes all the cliffhangers and reverses work so strongly is O’Brien’s understated, calculating control, his very stolidity when it’s his being threatened that animates the audience, not the more charismatic psycho of Cagney’s bravura turn.)

Nevertheless the star gets pretty much all the best lines, and in their thoroughly black drollery ("Oh, stuffy huh? I'll give it a little air", says Jarrett to a prisoner suffocating in the trunk of a car before perforating it with .45 gauge airholes) Australian audiences may hear an echo of lead screenwriter Ivan Goff’s Aussie background.

But to come full circle, in the end it’s all Cagney. His climactic immolation seers the memory as one of cinema’s peak moments of insane brilliance – and an image that couldn’t have resonated before its forerunner at Hiroshima.