I’m watching James Cagney movies this winter and last week I watched one of his most acclaimed movies — White Heat (1949).
The movie is considered by film critics to be one of the best gangster films of all time.
As I often do, I’ll start this post with an online description of the movie:
“Gang leader Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) lives for his mother, planning heists between horrible headaches. During a train robbery that goes wrong, Cody shoots an investigator. Realizing Cody will never be stopped if he knows he’s being pursued, authorities plant undercover agent Hank (Edmond O’Brien) in Cody’s cell.”
This description is wrong, though, because the investigator is shot after the robbery. But the conductor is shot by Cody.
All that aside, the robbery does go wrong, partially because a member of the gang is horribly burned. The gang has to hide out and we learn that Cody is very close to his mother, who helps him plan crimes. Closer than he is to his wife who is very lazy and sleeps a lot.
This isn’t an inappropriate relationship like Hamlet or Macbeth or whichever play that was, but Cody relies on Ma for a lot — including helping him when raging headaches hit him and practically debilitate him. The gang believes his headaches are the same mental illness his father had.
His mother doesn’t want him to let the gang see him that way because he will look weak.
It doesn’t matter if he looks week because his gang is ready to turn on him and take the money they stole from the train and cut him out of the deal no matter what.
He doesn’t know this, but he does know they have to split so the police don’t find them.
They have an injured gang member whom Cody orders one of his men to shoot. The man can’t do it, though, and leaves the burned man. The man still dies, and when he is found it is reported to the police, who eventually connect him to the gang.
A police officer sees Cody’s mom out by chance and they try to follow her back to the motel Cody, his mom and wife are staying at. She loses them but the police eventually find her car and corner Cody who shoots the investigator in the arm.
Cody is able to escape with his mom and wife, but finally decides if he really wants to shake the police, he will have to give himself up. He’s not going to admit to the big crime, though. He’s going to say he committed another crime that another criminal he knows pulled. He’ll only get about two years for that crime and it will be his alibi for the other crime. He couldn’t have robbed the train if he was committing a less serious robbery in another state, he says.
His wife and mom don’t like the idea, for different reasons.
His wife likes the idea a lot more when she realizes that her husband being in jail in another state will give her time with her husband’s second hand man, who she’s been having an affair with.
Cody’s plan works — sort of. The police figure out what he is trying to do, though, and still want to pin the first crime on him so they send an undercover cop into jail with him to try to make friends with him and find out where he hid the money from the train heist.
I’ll leave it there, so I don’t spoil what happens, but I am going to have to give a big spoiler here to discuss in the paragraph following this next one so if you don’t want to know, you need to stop here.
This movie was dark, intense, and while Cody Jarrett was a horrible man and easy to hate, I also couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for him because he felt crime was the only way to make a living.
SPOILER ALERT!!
Also, the one person who loved him and he loved dies halfway through the movie. I won’t say how his mom dies but it is her death that leads to a much-talked-about scene where Cody absolutely flips out after he finds out she’s gone.
What is interesting about this scene is a couple hundred extras were used as the inmates inside the cafeteria and none of them were told what Cagney was going to do. Most of the shocked faces focused on during that scene were authentic because they were kept in the dark about Cagney’s plans. Some of them really thought Cagney had flipped out.
Another scene we need to talk about happens at the end. Throughout the movie Cody’s mom always ends their conversations by saying, “Top of the world, son! Top of the world!”
This is a line that has been used in pop culture references and parodies for years and I never knew what it was. Now I do and it’s honestly quite heartbreaking. There is so much Cody could have done with his life and not only did he choose crime but his own mother encouraged him to do so.
Cagney came back to Warner Brothers for this film after leaving for several years to start his own movie-making business with his brother. When that failed, he accepted an offer from Warner Brothers, even though Jack Warner really didn’t want him back, mainly because he needed the money.
Warner famously called Cagney, “that little b******.”
Cagney famously said of Warner in Rolling Stone Magazine, “I used to like to walk out on him, frankly, whenever my contract didn’t suit me. I’d cuss him out in Yiddish, which I had learned from Jewish friends in my days at Stuyvesant High School. Drove him wild. ‘What’d he say?!’ he’d yell. ‘What’d he just call me?!’”
Their arguments mainly started over Cagney’s contracts in the 30s.
Rob Nixon wrote for TCM.com that White Heat is considered Cagney’s last good gangster film.
“An exciting, dynamic film in its own right, White Heat also stands out as the flaming finale to the era of stark, fast-paced crime films made famous by Warner Brothers and James Cagney (among other stars) from the 1930s on films in which the focus was on the often violent but charismatic gangster rather than the law enforcement officials who hunt him,” Nixon wrote. “It was also the apotheosis of Cagney’s brilliant career, a kind of summing up of the memorable outlaw characters he had created. His projects that followed in the 1950s were mostly lackluster affairs, and the cocky, pugnacious star audiences had come to love was glimpsed infrequently in such films as Love Me or Leave Me and Mister Roberts (both 1955).”
The film was directed by Raoul Walsh and in addition to Cagney it starred Virginia Mayo, Edmond O’Brien, and Margaret Wycherly as Ma.
Many scenes, such as the one mentioned above were adlibbed by Cagney or Walsh.
One of those was when he got annoyed at Mayo (his wife) and he was supposed to just glare at her but instead Walsh told Cagney to kick her off the chair she was standing on. For me, this showed how nasty and heartless Cody really was – as if the opening scenes hadn’t already shown that.
The story for the movie was written by Virginia Kellogg and she was nominated for an Oscar for it, but didn’t win and no one else was nominated. Over the years, though, the film has been praised and named as the fourth best gangster movie by the American Film Institute, has been quoted or parodied too many times to count and in 2003, the American Film Institute named Cody Jarrett in its list of the best heroes and villains of the past 100 years.
I have to be honest and say that the end of the movie annoyed me. I don’t want to give it away but it was a typical movie from the 40s and 50s with the whole idea of the bad guy suffering and the “good guys/cops” being the heroes was very cliché.
In many ways there was nothing good that was going to come for Cagney’s character, though, so things ending badly for him was probably the only way for things to go.
Next week I will be watching Angels With Dirty Faces with Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. To end the event I will be watching The Bride Came C.O.D. (which will move me into my Spring of Bette Davis).
You can read about the other movies I watched by clicking the links below:
Yankee Doodle Dandy
Sources:
https://www.tcm.com/articles/89404/the-essentials-white-heat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Heat
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