Film review: White Heat (1949)

To think, just last year I had no idea who Edmond O'Brien was, and now I've seen him in three great films: DOA, The Killers, and now White Heat.  Of course, while O'Brien plays the main "good guy" in this film, it truly belongs to Jimmy Cagney playing one of his nastiest hard cases of all, Cody (only Cagney could make someone called "Cody" threatening) Jarrett.  This is, of course, the movie that's famous for Cagney's final line - "Made it Ma!  Top of the world!" but actually it's packed with great lines.  Alec Baldwin is particularly taken (although he misattributes it to Public Enemy) with the scene where Cody has somebody he has a grudge against trapped in the trunk of a car and he taps on it and asks how he's doing.  "It's stuffy in here, I needs some air!" says the hapless stooge.  "Oh stuffy eh?  I'll give ya a little air" says Cody, and casually shoots four slugs into the trunk and strolls off, chewing on a chicken drumstick.  And that's actually a good example of how this film manages to be very violent without actually showing too much of the violence onscreen (presumably because this was in the height of Hays Code strictness).  This is done almost to a fault, because the murder of Cody's beloved (almost TOO beloved) mother, a pivotal moment, is not even shown at all, perhaps because a young woman shooting an old woman in the back (it's described, at least) was particularly shocking.  But toned-down on-screen violence aside, this is a non-stop thrillfest.  It starts with a train robbery (where two people die just because one of Cody's henchman blabbers his name in front of them, and that henchman accidentally gets scalded hideously), we then get various chases until Cody cops to a much more minor crime in Illinois to get a short sentence.  However, his no-good moll joins up with his no-good head henchman (something he more-or-less predicted: "You know something, Verna, if I turned my back long enough for Big Ed to put a hole in it, there'd be a hole in it") and said henchman tries to get Cody bumped off in the pen.  But his life is saved ("Whaddya want - a medal?") by the Edmond O'Brien character, who is undercover in jail.  He butters Cody up and soon they're planning their escape (so that the cops can finally nail Cody for something serious) when Cody hears of his mother's murder (she'd been trying to avenge the assassination attempt but Verna plugged her) and goes off the deep end.  See, Cody's been having these excruciating headaches (which, supposedly, started as fakes to get attention when he was a kid then somehow became real) and thinks he'll end up like his dad, dying in the nuthouse.  But after he flips out in mess hall and ends up in the psych ward, we find out he's been planning his own escape.  But he takes Edmond O'Brien (who is a cop called Fallon playing a con called Vic Pardo) along with him, and after the scene with the guy in the trunk, he bumps off big Ed and takes back Verna and reassembles the gang for a big score at a chemical plant.  And that's where we get our big denouement and one of the best deaths in cinema history. I see now why Cagney was a staple of every crap impressionist because he's just a total icon.  He commands the screen whenever he's on it (perhaps even more so in the earlier Public Enemy with the iconic grapefruit scene): he's just somehow so much more alive than everyone else, and even when he's crawling around cackling insanely, it's never ridiculous, it's totally compelling.  He was James Dean before Marlon Brando was James Dean.  We watched this because it's leaving the Criterion Channel in August, but I can't believe we hadn't seen it before.  Everyone should see this movie and bask in Cagney's greatness!  His re-telling of the story of the Trojan Horse alone is worth the price of admission.