White Heat

James Cagney’s performance as the despicable Cody Jarrett smears Raoul Walsh’s 1949 White Heat with relentless bitterness and misanthropy. Devoted only to his equally criminally-minded mother (Margaret Wycherly), a character seemingly inspired by the real-life Ma Barker, Cody has just led his gang through a successful train hold-up, which required multiple murders, but now that the police are closing in, he hatches a scheme: he’ll confess to a payroll robbery that happened to coincide with the hold-up, thereby giving him an alibi while reducing his sentence from certain execution to a couple of years in the pen. Edmund O’Brien plays Hank Fallon, a cop who’s sent to prison undercover to earn Cody’s trust (there’s soon a convenient opportunity to save Cody’s life) and infiltrate his gang when they get out. The fabulously surly Virginia Mayo plays Cody’s selfish wife Verna, who enjoys her husband’s prison time by shacking up with his accomplice Big Ed (Steve Cochran) and attacking Ma Jarrett every chance she gets. Cody is ultimately diagnosed with “homicidal psychosis,” which is further intensified by relentless migraine headaches, but we already knew that from the string of corpses in his wake. The film’s (literally) explosive climax is almost a perfect harbinger of film noir’s coming transition from the established tropes of the 1940’s to the greater volatility and unpredictability of the 1950’s.