James Cagney became one of the most iconic actors of Classic Hollywood by playing gangsters in some of the most important gangster films of the 1930s. By the end of the decade, however, he was quite tired of it and feared that he would be hopelessly typecast. So, he gave up on such roles and tried to switch his career towards different genres like musicals or comedy. At the end of the 1940s, however, he returned to the genre by playing another, albeit very different sort of gangster in White Heat, the 1949 film directed by Raoul Walsh, which is considered one of his best performances.
While 1930s gangster films depicted crime as a direct or indirect consequence of the sudden impoverishment caused by the Great Depression, the plot of this film depicts the world immediately after World War II, from which the United States emerged as the only economic superpower and the US Dollar became the only relevant world currency. In the markets of impoverished Europe, dollars are paid for in gold, and that's why the currency shipments become the targets of unscrupulous and well-organised gangs like the one led by the psychopathic Cody Jarrett (played by Cagney).
Jarrett skilfully thwarts the Treasury Department's efforts to catch him. In order to get an alibi for a spectacular and bloody train robbery, he confesses to a petty crime he did not commit. The idea is simply to sit in prison for a few years and collect the loot afterwards. However, the Treasury Department has devised a plan to take him down. Hank Fallon (played by Edmond O’Brien), one of its agents, is given the new identity of a convicted criminal, “Vic Pardo”, and sent to prison where he would gradually gain Jarrett's trust and become his best friend. In the meantime, Jarrett's young wife Verna (played by Virginia Mayo) becomes involved with Jarrett's lieutenant Big Ed (played by Steve Cochran) and decides to organise his murder in order to get hold of the loot.
White Heat reunited Cagney with Raoul Walsh, a director with whom he had worked on The Roaring Twenties, another grand classic of the gangster genre exactly a decade earlier. Walsh is considered one of the most successful and influential film makers in the first five decades of Hollywood and White Heat gives many examples of how such a reputation was made. Walsh’s speciality was action and those kinds of scenes represent the best part of this film - from the spectacular robbery at the beginning to the apocalyptic finale.
Another valuable aspect of the film is the script by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts, based on the story by Virginia Kellogg. Unlike the films of the 1930s, this film doesn’t serve any political agenda nor attempt to explain crime and other forms of social pathology by pointing towards poverty and other social injustices. Instead, the script, while trying to explain the roots of Jarrett's evil, turns to psychoanalysis, which was quite fashionable in Hollywood at the time. Jarrett becomes a criminal monster due to a pathological attachment to his overbearing mother, brilliantly played by Margaret Wycherly.
Her performance was, of course, overshadowed by the brilliant Cagney, who played one of the most memorable roles not only in his career, but in the history of film in general. Over the course of the film, his character undergoes multiple transformations - from a cold-blooded killer to a pathetic momma’s boy and, in the end, something resembling a tragic anti-hero. Cagney also overshadowed Virginia Mayo, who excelled in her role as a simple gangster moll, and Edmund O’Brien as the “normie” government agent.
Walsh's film also differed from 1930s gangster films by reflecting the general mood of the USA at the time, which was, thanks to victory in the war and the end of the Great Depression, more oriented towards the future than to the present. This might be seen in the final part of the film, which shows the authors’ fascination with modern technology. This is shown both through the final showdown being set in a cold, automated industrial facility where there are almost no people, and the authorities succeeding in catching gangsters through high-tech equipment. But the grand explosive finale could also be interpreted as the authors’ comment on the very likely possibility that the rapid development of technology could lead to a nuclear apocalypse - something that in the early years of the Cold War began to haunt the American public, including Hollywood.
While the film might look dated because of its black-and-white cinematography, it still retains its power and is quite worthy of Cody Jarrett’s famous final phrase: "top of the world".
RATING: 9/10 (++++)
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