White Heat (DVD)

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Jimmy Cagney could pretty much do it all, playing light comedy parts ("Johnny Come Lately," "Mister Roberts," "One, Two, Three"), song-and-dance men ("Yankee Doodle Dandy," "The Seven Little Foys"), crime-fighters ("G Men"), straight dramatic duties ("The Time of Your Life," "The Gallant Hours," "Ragtime"), and even Shakespearean weavers ("A Midsummer Night's Dream") with equal aplomb in a career that spanned over half a century. But it was undoubtedly for his gangster roles that he is best known, from "The Public Enemy" through "Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye." And right there at the top of the list is "White Heat," his most intense gangster portrayal of them all.

In his book "The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood" (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), film critic and historian David Thomson says, "I don't want to make too much of...the whole body of work we call noir, but there is this moment after the war when the thinking in pictures begins to turn adult, disillusioned, tough, and wry." There was certainly a huge interest in dark, edgy, pessimistic films during and after the Second World War, and by 1949 when "White Heat" came out, film noir was in full bloom. Cagney and "White Heat" go after it with a vengeance. Every face appears cast in half shadow, and the dark follows everyone like a second skin.

This was Cagney's return to the gangster genre and to Warner Bros. Pictures after a prolonged contract dispute, and both he and the studio wanted to make something similar to the old Cagney product yet different. They got what they wanted. He was a gangster again, but gone were the days of Cagney being the charming, charismatic hoodlum antihero, the crook we loved. In "White Heat" his Cody Jarrett is anything but charming; and he's more than a ruthless, unfeeling killer; he's a homicidal maniac and totally nutso.

He heads up a gang of fellow thieves and murderers, referred to in the papers as the Jarrett gang, and within the first five minutes of the movie they have robbed a train and a bank, killing half a dozen innocent people in the process. Jarrett is such a vicious weirdo, even his own gang think he's too cold-blooded, and one of them refers to him as a "crackpot." When a hostage in the back of Jarrett's car complains that he can't breathe in there, Jarrett pumps the lid full of holes. Good-bye hostage. Another example of Jarrett's macabre sense of humor is when a fellow begs of him, "You wouldn't kill me in cold blood, would you?" and Jarrett answers, "No, I'll let you warm up a little."

Then, there's mom. Never would we see a stronger or more bizarre mother-son relationship than Cody and Ma Jarrett's until Hitchcock stretched the situation in "Psycho" a decade later. Ma (Margaret Wycherly) is the real brains of the outfit, and Cody is devoted to her. In his youth, Cody would feign headaches to get her attention and sympathy; in adulthood these episodes would develop into full-blown, epileptic-like seizures, real or imagined. Ma Jarrett is tough as nails, as malignant as her son, and the only controlling force in his life; she's his shelter in the storm, and her house is always his hideaway. "Top o' the world, son!"

But Ma Jarrett isn't the only deadly female in the story. We have the more traditional noir femme fatale as well in the form of Verna Jarrett (Virginia Mayo), Cody's beautiful wife. She's both trashy and treacherous, ready to turn on her husband at a moment's notice. The movie drops the hint that she's a former prostitute Cody picked up, and she can go back to where she came from for all he cares. Moreover, she has an eye for another member of the gang, Big Ed Somers (Steve Cockran).

Cody may be crazy but he ain't dumb. When it looks like he's going to be picked up on a murder rap in California, he confesses to a bank job he claims to have done at the same time in Illinois. He figures the Feds can't nail him for murder if he was in another state at the time, and the maximum he'll get for robbery is two years. So about half the film has Jarrett in prison, while an undercover T-man, Hank Fallon (Edmond O'Brien), tries to gain his confidence and make him spill the beans about the murder.

The good guys in the movie are almost inconsequential. Philip Evans (John Archer) is the government agent tracking Jarrett and his gang, a character so straight-arrow, square-jawed, deep-voiced, and humorless as to seem like a parody. And the aforementioned Fallon is equally nondescript. In this movie, it's only Jarrett that counts, his Ma, his slutty wife, and the double-dealing Big Ed, bad eggs all.