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Rating:  - One of the best noirs ever!
This is top quality Cagney in one of his best performances. Cody Jarrett is an incredibly mean, messed up piece of work. His ma remains his best friend and worst enemy combined.
This is a great film with a class (and justly famous) ending. BTW, the scene in jail when Cagney throws his fit shows some surprised looking cons. They were real prisoners, and didn't know what was going to happen! Worth looking out for ....
Rating: - The Greatest of the Gangster Movies
Probably Jimmy Cagney's greatest performance as well. This 1949 film, directed by Raoul Walsh, represents the first real introduction of Freud into the movies. Hitchcock's "Psycho" did not follow for another 11 years.
Cagney's Cody Jarrett, driven by suffocating mother love and searing headaches, is nothing less than spectacular. There are almost too many great scenes to describe. The two greatest are Cagney's "white-heat" maddened scramble down the jail mess tables. Accompanied by his guttural, surreal moaning it is a brilliant piece of acting. Secondly, if you have never watched the final scene you will want to see it many times over again. It is unmatched in its visual effect for that period and even more famous for Jarrett's explosive oedipal scream.
Virginia Mayo is terrific as the sensual Verna Jarrett, Cody's wife. She is able to exude attraction to Jarrett's power, and frustration at her inability to compete in her rivalry with "Ma." Jarrett. Verna reaches out for Big Ed Somers (Steve Cochran) while Jarrett serves jail time. Somers is a handsome, tough-talking and ambitious member of Cody's gang, but much to Verna's dismay she can no more convert Big Ed's big talk into action than she can compete with Ma for Cody's attention.
Her failure to seduce Somers into a challenge of Jarrett's gang leadership leads to another great and chilling scene. As Verna rounds a corner of the gang's hideout she walks right into the fearsomely volatile Cody, unexpectedly out of prison. Cody has not come home for the holidays. Ma has clued her boy in.
Margaret Wycherly's Ma Jarrett is crude on the surface but sly and wonderfully nuanced thanks to Wycherly's performance. She is a woman who has given birth to a psychopath and lives vicariously through his power, while subliminally feeding his demons. We may know Freud and Oedipus, she just knows that her boy belongs on top of the world.
If you miss this movie you truly will miss the groundbreaking best of the gangster movie genre. I do take issue with classifying this movie as film noir. It is an outstanding bridge between the gangster movie and the film noir genre; but it is "gangster" at heart and at its best.
Rating: - "Let's play him as screwy."
After a decade long absence from the gangster genre, James Cagney comes roaring back in this Raoul Walsh classic. For a change of pace from his previous films of this type (ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES, PUBLIC ENEMY, ROARING TWENTIES, et al) Walsh and Cagney decided to play the character as being completely nuts. Is he ever! Cody Jarrett is a homicidal killer with a mother fixation and violent headaches. In one scene where Jarrett is dealing with a stool-pigeon he has locked in the trunk of his getaway car, he's calmly eating fried chicken when the man in the trunk protests he can't breath. "Oh, you need air?" He then pulls out his .45 automatic and ventilates the trunk (or boot if you are a Brit). He plugs a train engineer because one of his men blurts out his name. "You got a good memory for names," he says before he shoots the guy, kicks Virginia Mayo (who has never looked more beautiful and alluring) off a chair and ends in the famous "top of the world" finale. For films of this sort, it doesn't get better. Also starring is Virginia Mayo as Verna Jarrett, his wife, Edmund O'Brien as Vic Pardo (a federal agent who infiltrates Jarrett's gang) , Steve Cochran as the scheming Big Ed Somers and Margaret Wycherly -- who was SGT York's mom in the Gary Cooper classic -- as Ma Jarrett, the mother from hell who's "Always looking out for my Cody." The final scene is probably the best remembered line from the movie: "Made it Ma! Top of the world!"
Rating: - Sizzle- for - shizzle , Ma !
I try not to become exorbinate with words on my film reviews and edit it down to thirty words or less. I don't have that problem here. I can sum it up in five.
James Cagney at his best.
Then again...that's three words and name. But who's reading the fine print ? My bad , you are. :) And since you are....get this gangster classic !
Rating: - See What An Overprotective Mother Can Do To You !!!
I am viewing Warner Bros. wonderful "Gangster" collection, featuring mostly Cagney movies and this classic like the others in the set, all are high quality transfers and extras simulating an entree of features a moviegoer would sit through in the 1930's and the 1940's, a preview cartoon and a newsreel are the extras besides the feature and the feature with commentary.
As in the case of White Heat, we have an older James Cagney, meaner than the lovelorn somewhat sensitive gangster of "The Roaring 20's", a mature insane more cutthroat killer than found in the early "Public Enemy" giving this flick a decidedly modern twist with the psychological underpinnings of an overbearing Mother causing hypochondiac headaches in Cagney, as well as his inability to enter into any meaningful relationship with people.
The motive here is not just greed and power but viciousness,anger at betrayal and the rumblings of insanity beneath his surface.
When Cagney's world crumbles so must everyone Else's.
Other's have dealt with the story and all I can add is that this classic is entertaining and a must see.
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