“Where Ma goes, Cody goes.”
So says a police investigator on the trail of Cody Jarrett (James Cagney), the volatile leader of a notorious stickup gang and the arrhythmic heart of White Heat. Cody suffers from debilitating headaches, which can only be soothed away by a massage from his mother (Margaret Wycherly). He also sits in her lap like a child and splits his cut of the score with her. You’d call him a mama’s boy, except that we don’t normally associate that term with a man who calmly shoots train engineers during a heist and later orders the execution of one of the members of his own gang when the man’s injuries prove to be an inconvenience.
Cody’s mother issues are eyebrow-raising (director Raoul Walsh accentuates them at one point by superimposing Cagney’s face over Wycherly’s), but they’re hardly the only thing to grab your attention in White Heat. This is a heist movie, a police investigation thriller, a prison drama, and an undercover cop story all at once—and Walsh brings a confident professionalism to each genre.
By this time Cagney had well established his crime persona, beginning with 1931’s The Public Enemy, but his amoral, assaultive energy never fails to shock. He drives like a maniac, as if he’s looking for a squirrel to squash; when he wants the radio turned off, he tells a henchman to “kill it.” Naturally pugnacious (no single word has ever fit an actor so well), he can also turn on a dime toward gentility. A half second after killing a suitor moving in on his wife (Virginia Mayo), Cody offers her a warm smile and his arm.
Mayo’s Verna is also the recipient of far less gentle gestures, as was often the case with Cagney’s female costars. But she’s no punching bag. We’re introduced to her snoring in bed, which is oddly endearing; she’s not just a trophy, but an actual woman. It’s clear early on that Verna is playing both Cody and his rival in the gang, Big Ed (Steve Cochran), against each other, so that she has a place to land when the dust settles. And she’s not afraid to call Cody out. “It’s always somebody tipped ’em,” she says when the police start closing in. “It’s never that the cops are smart.”
White Heat is smart enough to give nearly every audience member whatever they could possibly want. There’s even a good guy to root for: Edmond O’Brien as Hank Fallon, a cop who goes undercover, befriends Cody during his stint in prison, then gets stuck in the gang when Cody unexpectedly busts out. (Fallon’s rubbing of Cody’s neck to relieve a migraine is as romantic as anything between Cody and Verna, especially given the plaintive turn in Max Steiner’s score.) In the end, Cody is caught, but in a way that pleases both the moral police and Cagney fans. Pinned in by coppers at a chemical plant, Cody Jarrett goes out on his own—or at least Ma’s—terms.
