White Heat
Short description
White Heat centres on Arthur "Cody" Jarrett, a gang leader whose devotion to his mother borders on the pathological. When a payroll heist at a chemical plant goes wrong, Cody and his crew find themselves pursued by the authorities, who have already identified him as the man behind an earlier robbery. To throw them off, he pleads guilty to a lesser charge and accepts a short prison term, hoping his alibi will hold. What follows inside those walls complicates the plan considerably, and events after his release push him toward a violent reckoning.
Raoul Walsh directed the film, the fourteenth of the twenty-three features credited to him and the one that followed Pursued and preceded Colorado Territory. James Cagney plays Cody, with Virginia Mayo as his wife Verna, Edmond O'Brien as Vic Pardo, Margaret Wycherly as Ma Jarrett and Steve Cochran as Big Ed Somers heading a credited cast of sixty-one. Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts wrote the screenplay.
Warner Bros. produced the picture for about a million dollars, and it returned roughly three times that amount worldwide. On IMDb it holds 8.1 out of 10 from around 38,000 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 7.6 from a much smaller pool of 558. The critics' rating of 8.8 from eighty-three reviews puts professional assessment above both audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- In 2003, the film was included in the National Film Registry.
- Filming took place in May and June 1949 in a railway tunnel under the Santa Susana Mountains, at the Shell oil refinery in Torrance, and in other areas of California.
- The film's screenplay was inspired by the real-life story of 'Bloody Mother' Barker, who led a whole gang of her sons during the Great Depression.
- The character of Arthur Jarrett, nicknamed Cody, was based on the murderer Francis Crowley (1912-1932), whose adventures ended in a shootout with the police and his arrest on May 7, 1931. Before his execution, he only asked to send his greetings to his mother.
- The idea to make Cody a psychopath belonged to James Cagney (1899-1986). While working on the image, Cagney remembered his father, who would become frantic when drunk, as well as patients of a mental hospital he once visited.
- The surprise of James Cagney’s fellow prisoners in the prison dining hall during the game looks completely genuine, and it was natural that it should be. Director Raoul Walsh (1887-1980) did not tell the other actors what would happen, so Cagney surprised them. In fact, Walsh himself didn’t know what to expect from Cagney. Cagney simply asked to have two of the largest extras playing prisoners seated next to him, and to film everything that followed without stopping the camera.
- At that time, they hadn’t yet begun using firecrackers to simulate bullets hitting obstacles during filming. For this purpose, they used snipers who fired bullets with a low velocity to break windows or show that a bullet had hit very close to a particular character. During the factory scene, Cagney himself was nearly hit several times.
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