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| Warner Bros. | Release Date: September 3, 1949 |
Starring:
Claudia Barrett, Edmond O'Brien, Fred Clark, James Cagney, Joel Allen, John Archer, Margaret Wycherly, Steve Cochran, Virginia Mayo, Wally Cassell
Summary:
A psychopathic criminal with a mother complex makes a daring break from prison and leads his old gang in a chemical plant payroll heist.
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Perhaps the roughest of the classic gangster movies, with a climax that almost blows the theater down. [24 Jul 2009, p.C3]
The Warners have pulled all the stops in making this picture the acme of the gangster-prison film. They have crammed it with criminal complications—some of them old, some of them glittering new—pictured to technical perfection in a crisp documentary style. And Mr. Cagney has played it in a brilliantly graphic way, matching the pictorial vigor of his famous "Public Enemy" job.
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Director Raoul Walsh does not stint on the melodrama or the almost casual violence, and Cagney duly exits in a blaze of tainted glory. [18 Jun 2013]
A seamy milieu, but we sense the firm moral order outside of which the outlaws suicidally place themselves. [29 Nov 1996, p.23]
The tight-lipped scowl, the hunched shoulders that rear themselves for the kill, the gargoyle speech, the belching gunfire of a trigger-happy paranoiac - one with a mother complex, no less - these are the standard and still-popular ingredients that constitute the James Cagney of White Heat.
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