White Heat

In the fall, a movie fan's thoughts lightly turn to thoughts of -- the Seattle Art Museum's annual film noir festival.  SAM once again has lined up nine movies, of which the first was shown last night.

White Heat, a 1949 gangster movie starring James Cagney, is considered a movie classic.  Cagney plays the role of Cody Jarrett, the leader of a gang of robbers whose exploits range, seemingly at will, across the western United States.  The movie starts off with a beautiful scene of a steam locomotive emerging from a tunnel in the Sierras.  The train is boarded, the engineer killed, the train stopped, and large amounts of cash removed from the mail car.  Much mayhem in the process.

Much of the rest of the film takes place in and around Los Angeles.  Scenes alternate between law enforcement officers in L.A. and Cody's hangout in a seedy motel where he is holed up with his accomplices, his girl friend, and his mother.  When it appears the law is closing in, Cody makes a dash for Illinois where he pleads guilty to a minor felony and finds safety serving a short prison term under Illinois custody.

The plot thereafter is a bit convoluted.  Needless to say, however, no one trusts anyone, and everyone's looking out only for himself.  Except Ma Jarrett.  Cody's mother has mollycoddled her emotionally fragile son since childhood, and he's still Mama's Boy.  Played by English actor Margaret Wycherly, Ma is the most interesting character in the movie, after perhaps Cody himself. 

Cody's in prison in Illinois when he finds out that his mother's been killed.  He goes to pieces -- totally.  But he pulls himself together and escapes, helped by a supposed friend who is actually a police undercover officer, and makes his way back to L.A.   After a long shootout in a Long Beach refinery, during which all of his accomplices are killed, a crazed Cody, laughing hysterically, goes up in a blaze of glory as the tank on which he is standing explodes into a ball of fire.

The scenes of post-War Los Angeles street life are fun to watch, and the prison scenes in Illinois convince you that "Crime Doesn't Pay."  Killings are brutal and rampant, but no blood is ever shown.  A scene in the prison where prisoners line up for inoculations shows one prisoner after another having his arm swiped with alcohol -- but no needles.  Display of hypodermic needles was apparently banned under the then-applicable Movie Code -- even when used only for medical reasons.

Light entertainment, but definitely entertaining.