White Heat

Raoul Walsh's White Heat (1949) is a striking mixture of the old-school gangster movie and film noir. James Cagney's mesmerizing performance and strikingly modern action scenes make it well worth a look.

Trigger-happy crook Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) orchestrates a blood-soaked train robbery before getting nabbed for a lesser crime. The Treasury Department sends one of their crack agents, Vic Pardo (Edmond O'Brien), to go undercover, befriend Cody in jail and infiltrate his gang. Resentful of the influence Cody's mother (Margaret Wycherly) has over the gang, second-banana Ed (Steve Cochran) schemes with Cody's unhappy wife (Virginia Mayo) to bump off Ma and take over the gang, leading to a showdown when Cody gets out of jail. Cody moves on from personal business to his next job: a robbery of a chemical plant's payroll.

White Heat comes a decade after the heyday of the classic gangster film, and there's little original about the movie. Walsh ably distills everything good about the genre, gives it a wicked noir edge and makes all the cliches fresh and powerful again. Coupled with slick, stylish direction, a crisp pace, moody photography and Owen Mark's exciting editing, Walsh crafts a gripping piece of work, balancing character with impressive set-pieces.

Walsh eschews the usual genre cliche of gangsters as a metaphor for "the American Dream." Cody isn't a hardscrabble immigrant shooting his way up the social ladder; he's simply a short-tempered psychopath with a creepy attachment to his mother. Like the live-fast die-young Depression-era gangsters, Cody doesn't have any ambition beyond becoming rich and infamous: he kills more men with a .38 than John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd did with Tommy guns. He's no match for the intelligent, determined G-Men, who use both technology (radio homing technology) and psychology (with Vic perversely taking Ma's place in jail) to bring him down. The literally explosive finale packs a wallop, the perfect exit for its violent and repellent anti-hero.

James Cagney was already one of Hollywood's iconic gangster after The Public Enemy, but builds on his previous roles for an amazing performance. Cagney makes Cody an amalgam of everything sick and hateful about the American gangster - the psychosis of Baby Face Nelson, the mother obsession of the Barkers - creating a warped, hateful and rivetting personage that dominates the show. Virginia Mayo is a perfect femme fatale, and it's good to see Edmond O'Brien (The Wild Bunch) before he became Hollywood's go-to eccentric old man.

White Heat is one of the best of the classic gangster films, and holds up very well against later installments in the genre.