White Heat Movie Review

This is the second film this week I've seen which begins with a man in bandages and ends with the protagonist engulfed in flames. I was unsure that I would agree with the introduction given at Cambridge arts picture house that this is the finest gangster movie ever, as this is outside my usual genre and era, which makes this a hard movie for me to evaluate.

But as the introduction helped point out, it had two interesting angles for those whom film noir does not excite: as a portrayal of a man with psychosis, and of his pathological relationship with his mother. Ma Jarrett (Margaret Wycherly) holds her own amongst a gangster mob, and it is her words about her son which end the film. Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) has sought all his life to get her attention, bringing on wild stress related headaches. But another woman is also interesting: Cody's wife (Virginia Mayo), who's a chameleon of feigned loyalty and defencelessness.

The other key relationship is with undercover police officer (Edmond O'Brien), who is assigned as 'Vic Pardo' to be Jarrett's cellmate to win his trust and extract a confession of Cody's real crime, not the one he admits to as an alibi to escape a death sentence. Thus the film is about deceits as characters build and destroy relationships, with Pardo filling Cody's maternal shaped hole to gain the desired information, which ends in a tense climax.