Major plot points are discussed, including the infamous ending.

White Heat is a wild beast of a film with a wild beast of a star. It is blunt, unpredictable, thrilling, grotesque, and frothing-at-the-mouth rabid. Films that hold up as magnificently as this one does do so because they have become benchmarks that the following decades have continually referenced – Psycho, A Clockwork Orange, Reservoir Dogs and even The Dark Knight all owe some manner of debt to it. I take issue with the film’s classification as noir (it bears more resemblance to a gangster flick, and most film historians that I’ve read provide the weakest justifications for its inclusion in the canon), but similar to other great films of the period (The Maltese Falcon, Mildred Pierce, The Big Sleep), whether it is noir or not is a moot point – White Heat thrills as much as it did when it was first released 60 years ago, an incredible film that can effortlessly stand on its own two feet.

Peek-a-boo, peek-a-boo, a raving psycopath sees you.

White Heat succeeds as well as it does for one reason and one reason only: James Cagney. Some credit must certainly go to director Raoul Walsh (High Sierra) and screenwriters Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts for crafting the captivating enigma of Cody Jarrett, but Cagney’s performance is so powerful, so eye-poppingly unbelievable, that it instantly eclipses the cinematography, the directing, the writing, and every other actor in the film. As soon as the deceptively diminutive actor steps on screen (at 5’6” he wasn’t exactly towering over people), everything begins to succumb to his irresistible gravitational pull; he’s a black hole, devouring anyone that gets too close. After the film has ended, it’s difficult to remember anything but Cagney and the wicked glint in Cody’s eye.

Cody Jarrett 1, Train Conductors 0

The film opens on a stunning train robbery. Shot on location, Cody leaps off of a bridge onto the moving train, scrambles over the tops of the cars, and sticks up the conductors. When an accomplice accidentally drops his name, he shrugs in mock apology as he guns down the innocent men. Seeing the grin that spreads across his face before he pulls the trigger, the audience is left with little doubt that he would have done it regardless. While his seedy life of crime provides undeniable pleasure to Cody, it doesn’t come close to the jollies he receives from taking lives. But both crime and killing pale in comparison to the great love affair of his life.

Virginia Mayo plays Verna Jarrett, Cody’s wife and a femme fatale to end all femme fatales. As Cody and his gang return to their secluded hideout in the woods, train loot in hand, it quickly becomes apparent that Verna keeps the band of thieves in check as much as Cody does. She’s a terror in her own right and an inextricable part of Cody Jarrett.

Verna where she always belonged, in between Cody's claws.

At this juncture, the half of you who haven’t seen the film are unsurprised by the generic nature of the setup, while the half of you who have are wondering what I’ve been smoking. Verna is, in fact, one of the most pathetic femme fatales in the history of noir. Although she superficially brings about the demise of Cody, her pitiful machinations in the face of his raw power are like a gnat trying to move a boulder. Cody also bears no love for her, and better minds than mine can determine why he tolerates her presence (for the sake of the film, she exists simply to illustrate how unbalanced he is). No, Cody’s great love affair isn’t with his wife; it’s with his mother.

Ma Jerrett (Margaret Wycherly) runs the gang with as much of an iron fist as her disturbed son does. A fictional adaptation of the legendary Ma Barker and the Barker-Karpis Gang, she is Cody’s cold-blooded equal. If so-and-so needs to die so mama’s boy can live to steal another day, then kill him dead quick. The two are unnaturally inseparable, and Verna is routinely shoved out of the equation so that Ma and Cody can once again declare their undying affection for each other.

Ma takes a moment to soothe her 53 year old son.

If that sounds borderline ridiculous, it frequently is. White Heat constantly walks the line between the absurd and the terrifying, juggling the two extremes with dizzying speed. One person may watch the film and be utterly horrified; another might interpret it as gross parody. Both responses would be valid, and that is partly where the film’s brilliance lies. Take an early scene where Cody’s head is split with a blinding migraine. As he moans and twists on the bed, his mother strokes his head and comforts him. After the headache passes, Cody sits on her lap and rests his head on her shoulder. On the one hand it’s a giggle-inducing image: a murderous stump of a grown man sitting on his ageing mother’s lap while she coos in his ear. How can you not laugh? On the other hand it’s horrifying, as this man-child in a perverted state of arrested development has a gun and a maniacal urge to use it. Would you rather your criminals to be of the predictable, evil sort? Or of the unhinged, psychopathic kind?

The latter is the scarier of the two, and Cody is petrifying simply because he is so unpredictable. In one scene, the most chilling in the entire film, Cody walks up to the trunk of a car that contains a bound traitor. Chewing nonchalantly on a leg of fried chicken, Cody asks how he’s doing, and the muffled voice inquires when he’s going to be released. Cody chuckles, gnaws some more of the chicken leg, and shoots the man dead through the trunk. In tone, performance, and execution, the scene is the precursor to Alex raping and murdering whilst crooning “Singing in the Rain” and the Joker performing his disappearing pencil trick. Half the audience is laughing; the other half is appalled.

In my mind, the resemblance is unmistakable.

The infamous climax occurs in a refinery on top of a globe-shaped gasoline tank. The insanity glimpsed in Cody at the beginning of the film is full-blown now; the rampaging gangster is stark, raving mad. Surrounded by coppers and abandoned by his crew, he fires off random shots and cackles with glee as the raging inferno builds around him. Other writers have claimed that the climax tapped into post-war fears of a nuclear apocalypse, but I think that whatever echoes of American anxiety Raoul Walsh managed to dredge up are completely superfluous to the more blatant and contextual imagery that the gas tank represents. Given Cody’s infantile infatuation with his mother, it’s difficult to ignore the resemblance the tank bears to an enormous, female breast. Cody began his life suckling at his mother’s bosom and now, at the end of it, he finds himself back where he always wanted to be. Given that context, his final utterance, one of the most memorable lines in all of filmdom, takes on a new and disturbing meaning: “Made it Ma, top of the world!”

Oedipal complex indeed.