White Heat
Directed by Raoul WalshCody Jarrett (James Cagney) leads a gang of violent criminals with a ferocity powered less by greed than by pathology. He is subject to sudden, overwhelming headaches that drop him to his knees and that only his mother, Ma Jarrett (Margaret Wycherly), can soothe; she is the fixed point around which his volatile world organizes itself. After a mail train robbery leaves federal agents with enough evidence to pursue the gang, Cody accepts a lesser prison sentence for an unrelated crime to establish an alibi – a calculated move that places him temporarily beyond the law's reach.
Inside Fulsom, Treasury agent Hank Fallon (Edmond O'Brien) infiltrates the prison under the alias Vic Pardo, befriending Cody with the aim of learning where the train robbery proceeds are hidden. Meanwhile, Cody's wife Verna (Virginia Mayo) drifts toward Big Ed Somers (Steve Cochran), the gang member left in charge outside. When Cody learns from a prison informant that his mother has been murdered – killed by Big Ed – he erupts in a prison dining hall scene of terrifying, uncontrolled grief that is among the most nakedly raw moments in the American gangster film. He escapes, settles scores, and gathers the gang for one last job: a refinery payroll heist that will end not in the score but in a cataclysm.
The film culminates at a chemical plant, where Cody, cornered and already wounded, climbs to the top of a gas storage sphere as it detonates beneath him. His final shout – "Made it, Ma! Top of the world!" – transforms catastrophe into a deranged declaration of triumph. White Heat is the terminus of the classic gangster cycle Cagney had helped define two decades earlier, and Raoul Walsh handles its late-noir darkness, psychological extremity, and spectacular violence with a hard, unsentimental authority.
