Classic Film for Movie Night: White Heat

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Organizing a family movie night or a movie discussion group can be great fun and a way to connect with family and old and new friends. Recently, we posted a list of ideas on how to organize a family movie night.

If you are organizing  a movie discussion group, selecting the films to view can be a challenge. Some people love the classics; others want more contemporary fare.   If your group is looking for a classic film noir, White Heat (1949) should be on your list. This is the first in a series of articles about recommended classic films that will get a  thumbs up from your movie group.

Don’t forget that you may be able to borrow the White Heat DVD from your local library or pick up some books on related topics. Check the bibliography at the end of this article for more suggestions. Your local librarians can guide you to resources.

Recently, author and film historian Patrick McGilligan offered his thoughts on this explosive film for the @ your library website. McGilligan wrote an introduction to White Heat for the Wisconsin/Warner Bros Screenplay series, from the Warner Brothers Film Library at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of My Backstory 5, interviews with Hollywood screenwriters of the 1990s, which was published by the University of California Press late last year. He has written books about James Cagney and directors Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor and Oscar Micheaux. He will soon publish a new biography of director Nicholas Ray for HarperCollins, McGilligan also serves as the film series advisor for books published by both the University of Wisconsin Press and the University of Kentucky Press.

MG: Where does White Heat rate in terms of crime films or film noir?

PM: I think it's one of the great film noirs, but I don't think that it is universally accepted as such. Mainly, I think, because director Raoul Walsh and James Cagney (1899-1986)  both did very few film noirs (arguably, this is Cagney's only one - maybe Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, also), and their involvement throws people. Also, in spite of some city scenes and the prison interlude, the film doesn't have the typical urban setting, film noir lighting or composition. In some ways it blends film noir with the Western and prison films and heist films. Of course its bleak, explosive, apocalyptic ending is strongly film noir.

MG: Where does it rate with critics?

PM:  I think it is under-rated, really. Cagney himself is always under-rated, taken for granted even when he is so exceptional. And Walsh is under-rated during his Warners Brothers Studio period. I watched it again this year with a film class and Cagney's role, his performance, really brought a collective gasp from the students. His performance (as Cody Jarrett) keeps the film fresh and modern, even when some things about the film (the police technology) are clearly dated.

(The American Film Institute ranks the film as the fourth greatest gangster film of all time, and Cagney as Cody Jarrett’s exhortation, ‘Made it, Ma! Top of the world” as one of the greatest film lines in history.)

MG: You mention in your introduction to the screenplay that it is one of the first films to shift the crime film setting to the West. How would you describe this subgenre?

PM: The classic gangster or crime film is set in New York or Chicago, with Scarface, Little Caesar and Cagney's own The Public Enemy setting the mold in the early 1930s. Quickly crime films moved west and there are crime or film noirs that are blended with actual westerns. But crime films set out West became very popular with audiences and partly because of the contributions of writers or directors new to California - and newly fascinated by the West - or in the case of Virginia Kellogg, who devised the original story idea of White Heat, a former Los Angeles Times reporter. Instead of bank holdups, you'd get train holdups - as in White Heat- and instead of shoot-outs around buildings, you'd get shoot-outs in the mountains - like High Sierra. The Western settings were popular with audiences back East. One of the attributes of White Heat is how specific and varied it is in terms of geography/topography, with the train hold-up out west, the prison scenes back East, the mountain scenes, the Horton Sphere refineries at the end on the outskirts of L.A.

MG: Explain why this was a comeback film for Cagney?

PM: Cagney felt straitjacketed by his gangster image. After Yankee Doodle Dandy he formed an independent company with his brother William and they produced a handful of pictures in the 1940s, some of them quite interesting and more or less a departure for Cagney in terms of the roles. None were very successful at the box-office. From his point of view, he couldn't convince audiences to accept him very often in anything but tough-guy roles. But actually, his company didn't have the same distribution power as the major studios. Cagney was a pioneer at independent production, one of the first, if not the first, of the major stars to break away from the system, and he didn't have all of the ideas and machinery in place to make it work. Cagney Productions brought him low financially, and he took a parallel deal with Warner Bros., his old studio, to give him some leverage with the bank and audiences. White Heat was his first film for the studio after years of trying for independence after Yankee Doodle Dandy. In essence, he was forced to go back to work as a gangster. As a consequence, he never spoke highly of White Heat, although most people would agree it is probably his greatest film and performance.

MG: Describe the relationship between Warner Brothers and Cagney at the time he did this film.

PM: Cagney had a longstanding antipathetic relationship with Warner's, owing to his contract disputes. (He worked too long for too little money in inferior films from his point of view, especially in the first half of the 1930s.) But he wasn't pretentious, he was pragmatic, and Warner Bros. was the studio best suited for him and most appreciative of his attractiveness to audiences. So he went into White Heat with a realistic viewpoint, knowing it was a film he had to do in order to make his future. Sometimes, the best films were made this way.

MG: In later life, you mention that Cagney had a negative attitude toward the film? What was that all about?

PM: He reacted against the crazy-gangster image in the film. He should have been proud of his performance and of his contribution to the script. But he was not arrogant about his talent, and thought he should have been doing more socially or artistically worthwhile projects. In those days, a gangster film was not regarded as socially or artistically worthwhile.

(Time magazine disagreed when naming Cody Jarrett one of the top 25 villains of all time.)

“He had played criminals before, but with Cody Jarrett, Cagney elevated the mobster to monster. The gang leader robs trains and factory safes, killing his underlings as the mood suits him. (‘You wouldn't kill me in cold blood, would ya?’ one asks. ‘No,’ he replies, ‘I'll let ya warm up a little.’) All the while, he totes his mother around, at one point sitting in her lap. Cagney brings sadism and pathos to this epileptic Capone, this oedipal wreck. His exit line, atop a gigantic gas tank, is one of the greats: ‘Made it, Ma — top of the world!’)

MG: An infamous scene occurs when Cagney sat in his mother’s lap. Who takes credit for this perverse scene?

PM: Accounts differ, but I believe it was Cagney's - on the spot - making a staging suggestion to the director. If you go back to Cagney's earliest films, and especially The Public Enemy, you will see that Cagney was comfortable referring to his mother's influence and showing emotion towards his mother. He was less comfortable in romantic roles, for example. But his own mother had been important in his life, he revered her, and that came across in his roles.

MG: How would you describe his performance in contrast to his previous work?

PM: He stepped outside of genres or conventions and showed what he was capable of. Cody Jarrett is a complex character, who laughs hysterically and weeps tragically and is trapped by his mother and indifferent (at times) to his wife. He is a man of action with mental problems. I think the screenwriters tried hard to give him an added dimension, and all of the effort - of Cagney and the director too - shows in a performance that goes beyond even that of Yankee Doodle Dandy.

MG: Was this one of the first films to show police techniques and operating procedures?

PM: Screenwriter Ivan Goff told me that it was one of the first films to show the kind of police radar that is depicted in the film, which must have been in the original Virginia Kellogg treatment, because it is a very "newspaper" topical kind of idea. I think earlier crime films also took pride in showing the latest police technology and that was part of their appeal to audiences (seeing "how the police and detectives do their work"). Usually writers and directors were fascinated by these kinds of procedural scenes that were touted in publicity as authentic and realistic. Way back in the silent era, for example, Hitchcock's early scenes for Blackmail (sound and silent version) are similar depictions of state-of-the-art police methods at the time. Hitchcock was always drawn to such details.

(Virginia Kellogg was nominated for an Academy Award for the story, and screenwriters Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts were nominated for best screenplay.)

MG: What was director Raoul Walsh’s contribution to the film and how does it connect with the themes of his other best films, especially with Cagney.

PM: I met and interviewed Mr. Walsh back in the day, and he said that he and Cagney had a special feeling for each other because both were from the same era. Once, when I was visiting Walsh, Cagney had been up to see him the day before. (I heard this often about Cagney, that he visited his favorite directors in their elder years.) Walsh was a great visual director, especially strong with action and masculine characters and with people like Cagney - or Errol Flynn is another example - he had actors he truly admired and the camera conveyed a strong sense of identification and feeling for them. Roaring Twenties (another Walsh film) is a good Cagney-Bogart vehicle and the under-rated The Strawberry Blonde (also directed by Walsh) is the best romantic comedy Cagney ever made. (Romantic comedies were not his forte.) The latter film put Cagney and Walsh back in the (idealized) New York where they grew up. Walsh treated Cagney in White Heat and other films like "one of a kind," which he was. His camera was very attentive to Cagney's movements as well as his expressive face. Incidentally, Marilyn Moss, who wrote a fine biography of director George Stevens, is finishing a life story of Walsh for the University of Kentucky Press, which should shed further light on Walsh's importance.

MG: Were screenwriters Goff and Roberts the auteur here? Describe their vision for the film and how they were able to sell such an over the top concept to Cagney and the studio.

PM: I think Goff and Roberts don't get enough credit, perhaps because the rest of their film careers were not as stellar. They were not big publicity-seekers, either. Cagney certainly respected them. He used them on several other films - three that are credited, I believe - Come Fill the Cup, Man of A Thousand Faces, and Shake Hands with the Devil - showing tremendous range and variety, incidentally. They tried to "serve the material" and the star in a way that was very professional, and they were perfect for Cagney on White Heat and other films in the 1950s. One of the things I like about White Heat is its lack of sentiment. Another is the various ways it bucks the Production Code. You have to credit the writers for this, firstly, because these are not the characteristics of other Walsh films. But Cagney also worked closely with them, as he did other favorite writers, like John Bright in the 1930s and the Epstein brothers in the 1940s.

MG: Where do you rank Goff and Roberts in terms of screenwriters of the era?

PM: I'm not much for ranking writers or directors or even actors. A few always stand out in every category (like Cagney!), and you can't avoid saying they are "the greatest," or something like that. What's important is how Goff and Roberts rank in terms of Cagney's career. They came along at a time when the other writers who had sustained his best films had fallen by the wayside for various reasons - including the blacklist - and Goff and Roberts picked him up with their momentum, and helped give us ten more years of Cagney films. They were excellent, wonderful writers for him.

MG: What was famed athlete Jim Thorpe doing in the movie’s prison scene?

PM: I didn't know the answer to this myself, so I emailed my friend Kate Buford, who wrote a very good biography of Burt Lancaster and whose biography of Jim Thorpe is coming out in the fall from Knopf. She said: ‘Yes, Thorpe was in White Heat. He is one of the convicts sitting at the mess hall table that pass the message to Cody Jarrett that his mother is dead. Thorpe was in over 70 -- probably many more -- movies in Hollywood from 1931 to Ford's Wagonmaster, Thorpe’s last film credit. Many are indeed uncredited and, given the ephemeral nature of the records for many extras in those days, we may never know how many movies he was in.’I would add that if you look at his filmography you will see he was in earlier Raoul Walsh films, and Walsh was known for carrying favorite friends and extras in his films. Read all about it in Native American Son: the Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe by Kate Buford.

MG: I have always enjoyed Steve Cochran’s edgy menace in this and other films. What did you think of his performance?

PM: Steve Cochran helps make the film - as do so many others, well-cast, in the supporting ensemble: Edmond O'Brien, Virginia Mayo, and Margaret Wycherly as Ma. In Cochran's case he had to be handsome enough for audiences to believe that he and Mayo have something going on behind Cagney's back, and sleazy/stupid enough to think he can betray Ma and take over Cagney's gang without suffering his obvious fate. As much as I like him throughout the film I think his best scene is his death and I always look forward to it - the moments leading up to it - ending with Cagney kicking his body down the stairs. The film has several memorable deaths, even before you get to Cody/Cagney's, incidentally. The frozen burned man in the mountains ... Ma's (which we hear about vividly) ... the guy in the car trunk who gets plugged by Cagney as he chews on a hot dog!

Resources

Books

Cagney by Cagney
JamesCagney

Cagney: A Biography
Michael Freedland

Cagney: The Actor as Auteur  
Patrick McGilligan

James Cagney: A Celebration
Richard Schickel

City Boys: Cagney, Bogart
Robert Sklar

Websites

Top 25 Greatest Villains Throughout Movie History from Time Magazine

Filming locations of White Heat at the Internet Movie Database

"White Heat (1949)" at Filmsite.org

Top 10Gangster FIlms from American Film Institute 

"Librarian of Congress Adds 25 Films to National Film Registry" Library of Congress

White Heat at Turner Classic Movies

White Heat at Rottentomatoes.com