By Vivaan Shah
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| James Cagney in Raoul Walsh's White Heat |
'Raoul Walsh, one of D.W Griffith's most gifted disciples,
was a tragedian of Shakespearean proportions who embedded in the genre of the
gangster film- the figure of the sympathetic outlaw, the rebel in the Jesse
James tradition. You didn't root for the police but instead for the bad guy who
you knew was doomed. Walsh's outcasts were bigger than life, they stood beyond
good and evil, their lust for life was insatiable, even as their actions
precipitated their tragic destiny. The world was too small for them and they
would often be given a cosmic battleground.'
--
MARTIN SCORSESE
Everyone
has a favourite film—the one—the single solitary picture that pops to one's
mind when asked what their favourite movie of all time is. The one film that
changed their life, the one that spoke to them deeply and was able to summon up
a sort of catharsis in the viewing of it. For me that film has always been
1949's White Heat made by the inimitable Raoul Walsh and starring James Cagney,
one of my favourite actors of all time. Cagney's gangsters as well as those of
Edward G Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield and George Raft were
spiritual precursors to the ones later essayed by DeNiro, Pacino and Joe Pesci.
All of these men had some personal knowledge, background or real life
experience with members of organized crime whether it be street corner hoodlums
or even small time racketeers. They all inordinately possessed what Cagney
referred to as a 'touch of the gutter'. They spoke the language, bodily as well
as vocally, breathed the vernacular and carried the scent of the street no
matter which circles they mixed in. They brought an authenticity to these portrayals
that only real life experience could provide. Cagney and Garfield grew up in
the Lower East Side, George Raft in the notorious Hell's Kitchen, De Niro and
Scorsese in Little Italy, Pesci in Jersey.
The gangster film can be classified in two categories—the urban film, mostly set in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, usually dealing with characters of different ethnicities such as Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants; and the rural gangster picture, born on the frontier and closer to the western, dealing with outlaws as opposed to racketeers. Films like White Heat, High Sierra, Bonnie and Clyde, Bloody Mama, Thieves Like Us, and The Grissom Gang fall into this latter category. These films usually dealt with outlaw gangs engaging in a vast variety of detailed heists rather than crime syndicates operating during prohibition. The first category is exemplified by such titles as—The Roaring Twenties, Angels with Dirty Faces, City for Conquest, Scarface, Little Caesar, Out of the fog, East of the River, Invisible Stripes, The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse, Bullets or Ballots, Force of Evil, On the Waterfront, Mean Streets, The Godfather, The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, Once Upon a time in America, and Goodfellas. Real life criminals like Baby Face Nelson, John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Ma Barker on the one hand and Al Capone, Bugs Moran, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel on the other, could also be sub-divided into these categories as rural and urban.
The gangster film can be classified in two categories—the urban film, mostly set in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, usually dealing with characters of different ethnicities such as Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants; and the rural gangster picture, born on the frontier and closer to the western, dealing with outlaws as opposed to racketeers. Films like White Heat, High Sierra, Bonnie and Clyde, Bloody Mama, Thieves Like Us, and The Grissom Gang fall into this latter category. These films usually dealt with outlaw gangs engaging in a vast variety of detailed heists rather than crime syndicates operating during prohibition. The first category is exemplified by such titles as—The Roaring Twenties, Angels with Dirty Faces, City for Conquest, Scarface, Little Caesar, Out of the fog, East of the River, Invisible Stripes, The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse, Bullets or Ballots, Force of Evil, On the Waterfront, Mean Streets, The Godfather, The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, Once Upon a time in America, and Goodfellas. Real life criminals like Baby Face Nelson, John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Ma Barker on the one hand and Al Capone, Bugs Moran, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel on the other, could also be sub-divided into these categories as rural and urban.
One
can simply observe the transition of a genre through the war by looking at two
Raoul Walsh gangster films. The Roaring Twenties was a culmination of the 30s
Warner Bros proletarianism and also a sort of twisted Horatio Alger Story about
the American Dream. All this culminated in the hostile psychosis of 'White
Heat', one of the toughest pictures ever made, where the same protagonist first
a tragic figure is now a raving lunatic. It's similar to the John Wayne-John
Ford progression from Stage Coach to The Searchers. White Heat is what is
referred to as a Freudian gangster film. It's about a psychopathic diminutive
gangster with a Napolean and Oedipus complex. Sporting a sternly tilted down
fedora and a tweed overcoat wrapped around him like a cloak, our protagonist
Cody Jarrett resembles at times The Joker, at times one of Dick Tracy's gallery
of gargoyles, or even at times Joe Pesci's seminal Tommy DeVito, or a more
bloated version of Cagney's own Tom Powers or Rocky Sullivan. With two sinuous
curls unfurling on either side and his forehead lodged in the centre like a
cement slab, his head tilted slightly sideways, and his mouth curving
downwards, he struts with a perturbed pugilist's stance, exhibiting all the
while, a sheer psychopathic devotion to his mother, Ma Jarrett (loosely modeled
upon Ma Barker), who by proxy runs their little outfit which holds up trains,
banks, armored cars, industrial payrolls, etc. Cody's second in command Big Ed,
brilliantly embodied by the carnivorous Steve Cochran, plots to overturn the
gang behind Cody's back with the aid of Cody's moll Verna while he is serving a
stretch for armed robbery in the penitentiary. The Treasury Department who is
pursuing Jarrett decides to plant a mole, played by Edmond O'Brien, in
Jarrett's cell. He manages to befriend Cody and they bust out of prison
together. What ensues is an expertly plotted cops and robbers hot pursuit, with
slow burn chase scenes in patrol cars, with blaring sirens, rambling police
radios, radar detection devices, magnetic frequency tracers, pre-GPS location
bearings. The law and order machinery is painstakingly depicted as invincible,
as technically advanced in the mechanisms it employs to carry out its tasks.
They use maps, tracking devices and a squad of several cars in close
communication with each other to tail Cody and his gang. The sequences are as
exhilarating as anything cinema has ever produced and also sort of appeal to
the child in all of us. It's reminiscent of the spirit and procedure of combat,
in the way the police car communicate with each other via radio and the way
Walsh cuts to each subsequent car as they rattle out a piece of information
into the speaker. The film is almost reminiscent of some of the Loony Tunes
cartoons in its dramaturgical extravagance. Lines like 'I was gonna split 50-50
with a copper' have a primal appeal bordering on the mythic.
Cagney's
famous prison outbursts when he finds out his mother has been killed is the
finest piece of acting ever filmed. Watch his body language as he distorts into
a primordial ape like form. Apparently while filming, the extras and ex-cons in
the sequence didn't know that Cagney was going to go bonkers, so their baffled
reactions are genuine. It's the quintessential descent into madness competing
perhaps only with Bogart's Fred C Dobb's in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
The performances and drama in these films are almost like Greek tragedies
exploding before our very eyes, the emotions so heightened and operatic that
they cross the furthest frontier of melodrama and hit at a deeper truth than what
realism might have achieved. In fact most of the Warner Bros films of this era
were like that. It was perhaps the studio with the most singular aesthetic in
the history of cinema; a close second would be Germany's UFA. These films all
had a particular texture, in the use of faces, voices, cinematography, or Max
Steiner's thumping background score, even in the costumes and production
design, mostly on the studio backlot which doubled up as everything from a
Banana Plantation in Borneo to a rubbled war torn European town. The film's
final showdown with the police takes place in a chemical power plant which
explodes as Cody screams--'Made it, Ma! Top of the world!'. Cody Jarrett
really starts to go nuts as he surrounded by the police, firing back at them
incessantly even when faced with tear gas and machine gun fire. Cagney's acting
in this scene is extremely complex; the depths of derangement plumbed in his
maniacal laugher itself set a standard for playing insane. There's nothing over
the top or phoney about it, it carries the cold hard sweat of real life
experience. One ought only to read his autobiography 'Cagney on Cagney' to
understand some of the things the man had seen in his life. He said he drew
upon some childhood memories of a visit to a mental institution, in order to
faithfully render the sobs, the screams, and groans. It's chilling stuff and it
gives one goose flesh to simply think about it. 'I don't know, maybe I am
nuts.' Cody's admits, in a rare gentle scene where he confides in the undercover
cop (the Edmond O'Brien character). 'All I ever had was Ma' note is detectable
in his stiff voice which almost begins to tear. 'Without her who knows... maybe
I'd wind up like my old man and die, kicking and screaming in the nuthouse.'
It's a deeply moving scene, as is the famous scene where he gets one of his
headaches and is comforted by his Ma, sitting on her lap. The film's hurls
forward at a velocity that cuts through the screen. Max Steiner's background
score is like the thunder to its lightning momentum. The movie opens with an
aggressive swish-pan from a speeding train to a car careening across a turning.
Walsh immediately cuts to Cagney inside the car, seated on the passenger seat,
impatiently tapping on his watch as he signals the getaway driver to step on
it. There's something electric about Walsh's direction. Along with being one of
the most tender gangster films this one also happens to be one of the most
brutal. A rail engineer gets shot point blank in the stomach and falls on a lever
letting out a gust of steam that scalds another gang member's face. He spends
the next scene wrapped up in a bandage like a Frankenstein monster begging Cody
not to leave him. There's a sequence where Cody, munching on a chicken leg goes
up to the trunk of his car and asks a person he has locked up in there how he's
doing in there. When told that it's a little stuffy, he says—'A little stuffy
ha? I'll give it a little air.' He emptied three bullet holes into the trunk
and tosses the chicken leg away. This was the first post modern gangster
film.
Readers, please feel free to share your opinion by leaving your comments. As always your valuable thoughts are highly appreciated!
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| James Cagney delivers his famous 'Made it, Ma! Top of the world!' monologue in Raoul Walsh's White Heat |
Readers, please feel free to share your opinion by leaving your comments. As always your valuable thoughts are highly appreciated!
About Author -
Vivaan Shah is an actor, director, writer, musician, singer, and painter. He has tried his hands at various art forms though acting is the one through which he earns his bread and butter. He studied in The Doon School, St.Stephen's College and Jai Hind College. He has been active in the theatre scene since he was a child. Theatre is unquestionably the most important medium in his life. Currently he is trying to make it as a fiction writer of genre and hardboiled novels.
White Heat - Trailer (YouTube)
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