-Devdutt Trivedi
White Heat stands out as Cagney’s been-there-done-that film with director Raoul Walsh rumbling through the dark lit visuals, resulting in a cracker of a Film Noir that begs continuous revaluation. The film was produced by Warner Bros., and was the comeback film for the 50 year old Cagney in a part which would rewrite the true blue gangster miles ahead of the weak attempts at the same genre by Hollywood in the ‘70s in the films of Francis Ford Coppolla, Michael Cimino and Martin Scorsese.
The film is a signature entry into the Film Noir cycle marked by its adaptation of hard boiled literature seen in the novels of James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, who also occasionally wrote the scripts for these Noir films. The Film Noir was a style of lighting which found its origins in the German Expressionist film makers of the ‘20s many of whom migrated to Hollywood after the Holocaust and made crime thrillers from American pulp literature. These included Robert Siodmak, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder and Otto Preminger who raised the Studio B-Film made on make shift sets and second line production staff, to the level of High Art. Film Noir was a term given by the French who only saw these films after the war in 1946 and noticed that they had similarity in content and style, mainly the use of dark frames with tall shadows. White Heat shares with the films of the Noir cycle, a paranoid perception of America, almost a nightmarish vision of the American middle class where law-breakers are not mentally ill in the obvious sense like in the crime films of the early ‘30s and committed crimes through well designed schemes and for definite reasons.
The first category of the noir is the studio produced noir which consisted of indoor sequences with typical noir lighting, seen first in Boris Ingster’s Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) and at its pinnacle in the greatest noir of them all, Citizen Kane (1941). The other category is the realist noir which would usually use location spaces and use voice over to comment on the society derived around the location space but more importantly the police procedure in all its details that would solve a particular crime. The most important example of this category of the film noir is Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1946). Whereas the second category would show the superiority of the State in solving crime, the first one would be the more insinuating of the two, constantly confronting the audience with a dark picture of their own society.
White Heat was produced at Warner Bros, whose films especially their noirs were known for their social realism especially in showing working class characters and showing them at their work. The studio came to be known as the ‘Echo chamber of studios’ as they kept remaking their own films or at least reusing material from previous films. Like Cagney, the male actors at Warner Bros. were average looking tough cookies instead of the good looking and slightly effeminate ones at MGM. Similarly the women characters at ‘WB’, best represented by Virginia Mayo who plays the character of Verna Jarret in White Heat, were such that their external sex appeal was marred by an ugliness of character. This is
seen in White Heat, in the sequence where Verna spits out her chewing gum to kiss Cody for the last time.
Walsh began by assisting the great D.W. Griffith and directing action sequences in his films. Walsh’s early works which are witness to his greatness, such as Regeneration (1916) and the unusually underrated Kindred of the Dust (1919) are yet to be released on DVD even in America. According to Dr. Drew Casper in his commentary on White Heat (Warner Bros Entertainment, 2005), Walsh preferred a linear narrative where a link between scenes and individual shots create a zigzag movement. Action overlaps the screen with words so that, as in Walsh’s own words, ‘the screen (is)….ceaselessly filled with events.’ Walsh uses a succession of mid shots and certain long shots and respects spatial contiguity and therefore chooses not to break it with the close up. The camera movement only functions to capture the character’s movement to fulfill Gilles Deleuze’s dictum of movement-image where the movement in the story, character and camera meet. Walsh would use a multi-camera setup, usually of three cameras and would film sequentially so that most of the editing would be completed in the camera. On the edit table Walsh would only refine his in-camera editing to allow for a staccato rhythm to the editing best seen in White Heat.
Walsh creates a textured soundtrack where two to three things would happen at the same time. According to author and film professor Drew Casper, Walsh would send the composer the script much before he talked about it.
The Film Noir would represent the law makers as being from the claustrophobic American cityscape and the law breakers as being from the wide American rural landscape. The film follows the gradual increase in the pathology of the character which may have several causes including Cody’s strange mother, the death of his father and Cody’s resulting mother complex. The film though does not analyze these factors and in the tradition of the best in Film Noir presents them through the affect denoted through the horror on Cagney’s face as he delivers his lines.
The film did find trouble at the censors, and was amongst the last to show serious gangsters as belonging to normal society. The film obtained a ‘B’ certificate denoting that it was objectionable in parts for its detailed depiction of crime. Authorities thought that the film would give criminals ideas on how to perfect their crimes. It also faced objection from the Church for its cold depiction of sex and violence.
The film was a hit bringing in $3.483 million at the box office and helping Warner Bros to become the highest grossing studio of 1950 bringing in a total of $10,217,851. Warner Bros would follow up the success of White Heat with Gordon Douglas’ even more cynical Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. Alongside the audience, it was also lapped up by the critics leaded by none other than Variety magazines’ Bosley Cowther that pronounced it as Cagney’s staggering return to the gangster role. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Script.
The Warner Bros Noirs were known for their last dialogues, none better than White Heat. The film closes with the Chief of Police saying ‘He finally got to the top of the world and it blew up right in his face.’
Courtesy
All trivia and subjective details about Walsh’s creative process from author and film professor Dr. Drew Casper in his commentary on White Heat; © &® Warner Bros Entertainment,2005.