From the 1940s: White Heat

1949 Crime Drama

From Warner Bros

Directed by Raoul Walsh

Starring

James Cagney

Virginia Mayo

Edmond O'Brien

Margaret Wycherly

Steve Cochran

John Archer

Wally Cassell

Fred Clark

In the mid forties Cagney sued Warner Brothers and left the studio, forming his own production company.  Many things had been at issue... salary, how he was treated, haggling with Jack Warner and the endless gangster pics he was obligated to do.  Oh, he knew he'd made some successful movies in the genre but he thought of himself as a song and dance man, particularly after his 1942 Oscar for Yankee Doodle Dandy.  He was tired of killing people.

However, the few pictures he did for his own company didn't make a nickel and he was hurting financially.  He swore he'd never return to WB and the studio chief, who hated Cagney, swore he'd never take him back.

After they stopped all that swearing, Cagney was not only back at Warners, with a higher salary, more choice of scripts, promises that Warner would not berate him in front of others and so forth.  The actor did not have a choice over the film he would first make upon his return.  Warner, perhaps with one last chance to turn the screw, set up another gangster flick.  

Despite having turned down gangster films for 10 years, Cagney believed that White Heat was extremely well-written.  He felt his character, Cody Jarrett, while cruel and deeply troubled, was written so that we came to understand how he became that way.  He was pleased how the gangster's road to destruction was written in such a way that was easy to follow.  He liked how, unlike some of his previous gangster roles, the character is in no way glorified.  

White Heat could be the best gangster picture ever made up to that time. In years to come Scorsese, Coppola and others would fare pretty well in the gangster film department but White Heat still stands tall among the best gangster movies of all time.  

Jarrett, bad from birth, is a characterization steeped in insanity, hardness, ruthlessness and menace.  What a horrible, scary creature he is.  Arguably perhaps he had no redeeming qualities... he didn't have any that I could detect when I watched the film again an hour ago.  

Cagney, while certainly aware of the hoopla attached to the movie, rarely spoke of it.  If an interviewer brought it up, he steered the conversation elsewhere.  He saw Jarrett as evil and he never wanted to allow him in his brain.  

If Cagney didn't think this was one of his best, his very best performances, top two or three, then he must not have had much clarity on his own work.  I suspect, however, that he knew it despite decrying he's just playing another hood.

Two things about Jarrett worth knowing are he has vicious migraines which, at the onset, may have him on the floor, rolling around in pain... and this is even in public.  The other is that he's cornered the market on being a mama's boy.  Ma Jarrett (more on that name later) as played by English character actress, Margaret Wycherly, is one scary mama.  There isn't anything she wouldn't do or probably hasn't done for her sweet Cody.  There's no doubt from where he learned wickedness.  Her performance is chilling.  Since first seeing the movie, I have always been able to recall her face in detail.  I've also never seen her in anything else that I can recall.

With the wife and mother who despise one another

While the acting and directing are superb there are other things.  One is certainly the story.  Cody is the head of a small gang of robbers.  Ma is part of it, too, so are Cody's wife Verna (Mayo) and Big Ed (Cochran) and Cotton (Wally Cassell) and a few others.  The gang robs a train and makes off with $350,000 and kills four men.  It doesn't take the police long to discover it was pulled off by the Jarrett gang. 

The cops are at the top of their game and work well together in teams to bring down the criminals.  Cody, who's hiding the stash, decides to plea to a lesser crime in Illinois that would establish he couldn't have been involved in the railway robbery, although he will have to do 2-3 years for the Illinois crime.

Cagney and O'Brien

Enter Edmond O'Brien playing Fallon, a cop, who will get sent to the same prison as Jarrett and share the same four-man cell, getting chummy with him and hopefully securing his arrest later for the train robbery.  Watching this cat and mouse game is one of the film's highlights.

While Jarrett is away, Verna kills Ma, shooting her in the back.  The two women hated one another.  Verna carried some extra baggage because she knew Cody didn't love her nearly as much as he did Ma.    And of course Ma rubbed it in.  The two actresses had a few good, bitchy scenes.  I was bummed that we didn't get to see Ma's death on screen.  I think the filmmakers missed an opportunity here.  When Cody hears of Ma's death, he doesn't hear how she died.

Jarrett also hears that Verna is doing the bump n' grind with Big Ed and we know things will not work out too well for Ed who has dreams of taking over the gang and Jarrett's wife.

Steve Cochran as Big Ed

Jarrett and Fallon and a couple others escape... they already have their new caper set up.  Jarrett heads for the cabin where Verna is staying.  He smacks her around some and she is afraid, especially when talk turns to Ma.  Verna tells Jarrett that Big Ed killed Ma... shot her in the back.  Verna worms her way back into Jarrett's affections after he kills Big Ed.

The big job is about a heist of almost half a million at a chemical plant's pay station.  But Fallon has found a way to alert the cops and it seems like the entire force shows up for the film's famous ending.  Jarrett, alone on top of one of the tall structures, his gang all killed, shoots at the towers causing a massive explosion and he himself dies as he screams made it, Ma, top of the world.  The expression is used several times during the story.

What a way to go

Cagney had casually known Virginia Mayo around the WB lot for a few years and he liked what he saw.  He personally requested that she play his sluttish wife.  They formed a mutual admiration society that would lead to a second film together, a musical, The West Point Story, the following year.  She found him to be kind and gentle... unless, of course, the script called for something else.  When they shared a scene together and he thought she should do something another way, he always prefaced his comments with would you mind very much if I gave you some advice?  He never wanted to offend.  

Mayo also said that in two rough scenes... where he pushes her off a chair and onto a bed and especially in the barn scene where he clamps down on her neck... she could hardly get the words out.  And then when the director yelled cut, Cagney fussed over her, telling her repeatedly that he hoped he hadn't hurt her.

Critics found Mayo's work here to be smashing.  Like Cagney, she preferred working in musicals but due to White Heat and a few more films, I found her to be an exquisite bad girl.  Her face was remarkable at feigning insouciance while being bitterly upset.

Wycherly is utterly watchable playing the devoted and loving mother with such reptilian intensity.  I would have liked to have seen her part expanded.

O'Brien stands out because he's the only good guy of the five top-billed actors but he doesn't have the opportunity to chew on the scenery as the others have done.  

This was the fifth of six films Cochran and Mayo made together.  They were best (platonic) buddies for many years.  Cagney thought Cochran played wholly believable gangsters and with dark, sexy good looks to boot could have inherited Cagney's gangster mantle at the studio. 

B actor John Archer delivers a tough and convincing performance as the tenacious cop.  Surely this was the best role in a good film that he ever had.

There's a wonderful scene in the prison mess hall where Jarrett learns of his mother's death.  One of the men sitting at the long table playing a character known as big convict is none other than famed Native American Olympic gold medalist Jim Thorpe.  

Raoul Walsh was the perfect director to guide this turbulent masterpiece.  He was one of those man's man directors and an old master of movie hoodlumism.  He loved to see his male heroes at the end of their tether.  Having directed Cagney in The Roaring Twenties and The Strawberry Blonde, they spoke a sort of shorthand when working alongside one another.

The screenplay, which sparkles with crisp and gutsy dialogue, came from a story by Virginia Kellogg which was about a real-life murderer from New York who wished his mother well as he was dying. Screenwriters Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts adapted the story based on the infamous outlaw Ma Barker who trained her four sons to be murderers and robbers.  Ma Barker became Ma Jarrett minus three sons.  

I always found it gross that Cagney wasn't at least nominated for an Academy Award but the truth is in those days that just didn't usually happen for gangster characterizations no matter how well done.  Pity.

Here's the trailer:

Next posting:

New publication dates.

The next posting will be on May 5. And that will usher in a change that looks to be permanent.  Postings will no longer be Tuesdays and Fridays but rather on the 5th, 10th, 15th, 20th, 25th and 30th of each month.  The only exceptions will be chosen obituaries which I feel need to be timely.  Can you handle it?