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Jan 24, 2019 · 30 Minutes On: "White Heat". “White Heat,” about the final months in a gang leader’s life, is a ruthless tale, ruthlessly told—an artistic peak for its star James Cagney and its director, Raoul Walsh, who had worked on two other features together, the gangster classic “The Roaring Twenties” and the romantic comedy “The Strawberry ...
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 ...
Top of the world, Ma! Oscar-winner James Cagney ("The Public Enemy," "Yankee Doodle Dandy") explodes on the screen as a demented gangster whose intricate pla...
Seen today, White Heat stands as one of the classic crime films of the 1940s, containing perhaps Cagney's best bad-guy portrayal. The star plays criminal mastermind Cody Jarrett, a mother-dominated psychotic who dreams of being on "top of the world." Inadvertently leaving clues behind after a railroad heist, Jarrett becomes the target of the ...
White Heat (1949) is one of the top classic crime-heist dramas of the post-war period, and one of the last of Warner Bros' gritty crime films in its era. White Heat is an entertaining, fascinating and hypnotic portrait of a flamboyant, mother-dominated and fixated, epileptic and psychotic killer, who often spouts crude bits of humor.
