The Steel Tit

278.D: R. Walsh: White Heat, 1949, 108'40"

On the surface, there could hardly be more contrasted actors than Antony Perkins and James Cagney. The one gangling but outwardly polite. The other anything but a nice boy. Yet both have alter-egos in the form of murderous mothers. Cody Jarrett is morbidly dependent on Ma. She is so incensed by his being cuckolded that she attempts to plug the perp. Instead Big Ed. gets her in the back and seals his own fate as Cody goes ever deeper into madness. Norman Bates won't share his mother with another man so he kills them both to embody his own mother.

I don't know if Hitchcock saw White Heat. He didn't make gangster pictures: his villains and heroes and heroines are all middle class - his Cuban revolutionaries in Topaz may wear army fatigues but they have nice mistresses and nicer villas. Edmund Gwenn is about as low-life as Hitch went, starting as an upstart factory owner in The Skin Game, passing through chummy paid killer in Foreign Correspondent and ending as a retired seaman in the Trouble with Harry. Frenzy has a down-market or at least down-the-market feel but the cockney fruiterer is lower middle class, owning his own business, like Hitchcock's father, while the down on his luck scapegoat has a public school manner.

Probably Cody and Norman have some common cause in primitive Freudianism. There may also be some cinematic forerunners. Maybe somewhere behind the Jarretts on the run there lies the counter-type of the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath. The good mother replaced by an evil one.

Cody's headaches are described by the detectives as some kind of a pseudo-fit to get the attention of his mother. Yet as he collapses onto all fours, Cagney may be drawing on the stage vocabulary of a Jekyll & Hyde transformation.

White Heat contains the most startling scene of suggested homosexual activity in forties cinema. To infiltrate the Jarrett gang, an informer needs to get close to him in prison. His early overtures are brushed aside but Cody's chill melts after Pardo has saved his life. In the prison workshop, Fallon takes on the rôle of comforter, cradling cody's head in is lap as he massages the back of his neck. That shot stands out for being an activity hidden from the guards and fellow prisoners. We might wonder if its full meaning is kept from the audience. It is notable that the undercover cop has a beard for a wife.

Later, Cody catches Pardo on his way out of their hide-out. The cop explains that he was on his way to a rendevous with his wife. At this point Cody expresses his contempt for Velma, asserting that the only woman who mattered to him was his mother. He explains that he still talks to his mother. This is a Gothic scene with dark trees and high winds stirring them. The night ends with Cagney being ridden upstairs by Velma as if the sexual tensions of the night have finally to be resolved in an acceptable way. He has promised Vic that they will take a vacation after the big job. It seems clear that he has in mind the three of them and probably not Vic's wife.

In Psycho, we are encouraged to feel sympathetic towards Marion because of her frustrated existence in an irksome job apart from her fiance and with no prospect of improvement in the short term. Unlike Velma, she wants cash to buy off unhappiness - the phrase, used by the obnoxious customer who waves his wad of cash in her face. She gives in to a momentary impulse - fatally as it turns out. Velma's disloyalty is however typical and instinctive. For Cody, the shower-curtain remark seems to contain at least three elements - sexual flirtation, a notion of uncovering and a suggestion of economy. He is saying he knows what she is like naked.

In White Heat, Cagney gets to kick Velma off her chair - violence towards women was a trademark of his gangsters.

If Public Enemy had ended with Cagney as the Mummy, White Heat begins with his accomplice being scalded in hot steam. Wrapped in bandages, he becomes a liability. Yet the mercy of his henchman in not delivering the coup de grace he is told to turns out to add to the horror - we learn that he starved and froze to death helplessly in the cabin.

Part of White Heat is played out at a Motel. It is here that Verna has got her mink coat and here that Cody kicks her off the chair. The car is traced there by detectives and one of them makes the error of going to spy out the land alone, while his colleague tries to restore radio contact.

Our first shot of Marion Crane is teasing and post-coital. There is an air of sleaze about the afternoon assignation but we are encouraged to see her more positively when she reveals how she hates these snatched sex sessions. Velma is introduced to us in bed, mouth open, snoring loudly - unmistakably the slut. She is, however, a survivor. Turning up at the scene of the final shoot-up and inferno of White Heat, she looks set to play the girl-friend for the police to coax Cody to lay down his weapons in return for a blind-eye to her own crimes - which include murder. In the final insult, she is weighed up and dismissed quickly - hustled out of the way so she does not get to steal any of Cagney's finale. At least she makes it nearly to the end of the picture, unlike Laury who is forgotten about in Angels.

Both movies feature corpses in the boots of cars. Marion becomes luggage and has her paper with the money thrown in undetected. Cagney insists on springing the prisoner who had made an attempt on his life. Made to ride in the boot, Cody leaves him in there overnight and casually shoots air-holes for him the next morning - while eating a chicken drumstick.

Our introduction to Ma comes as she tells him she could do with some help. This might seem like an appeal for her little boy to do some of the woman's work but it turns out to be a hint that her daughter-in-law is not up to the mark. The cold of this cabin is emphasised - Cody will not allow a fire for fear of the smoke betraying their whereabouts.

While Cody is in jail for confessing a minor offence he tells his cellmates how Ma will keep his share of the cash. We then fade directly from Cody's face to that of Ma Jarrett presiding over the gang and making the same point. While not quite as striking as Hitchcock's famous face-merge shot, this does make a similar point in a lower key.

Late in the picture, Cagney is visited by his Trader, a man who speaks in a different more genteel register from the gang members. "Your truck will be driven past these checkers by an ex-convict of my acquaintance. He's now leading a scrupulously-honest life, as a truck driver for this very firm." There is a suggestive scene where the gang wait outside and discuss whether something funny is going on between Cagney and the visitor. His fishing cover is seen through by Pardo, who began the picture planning a long angling vacation. In the event, his own task is a form of fishing for men. The scene in which Cagney introduces his old friend to his new one suggests sexual jealousy. As if to make the situation crystal clear, Cagney introduced Vic as his partner, "Vic's my partner. Fifty-fifty."

The feminising of Vic is clear when he uses soap to write a message on the truck-stop mirror. This is nearly always a girl-thing done with lipstick. When he pegs his coat over to hide it, it is suggestive of a sexuality undercover.

There is a lack of any emotional space granted to Pardo: we know what he does and we know he is faking. Yet his face remains mask-like and grittily masculine. There is little sense of anything personally attractive in his manner. The chilly performance and lack of any emotional exploration of his rôle by the script - it was potentially an equal part to Cagney's: what kind of a man would spend half of his life locked away in prisons to bring criminals to justice? Pardo remains hard which seems to give Jarrett permission to go soft. As it is, perhaps wisely, the star has our entire emotional engagement. Velma and Big Ed are also unsympathetic characters. The mother is a wonderful grotesque but she is not even allowed a death-scene. The way Walsh has this reported allows the shock of the event to register with the audience exactly at the same point it reaches Cody.

The Cagney-hard and Cagney-soft game was played it might seem to the limit in Angels with Dirty Faces. His final collapse is allowed to remain ambiguous. Has he finally lost it, faced by the reality of the technology of his execution or does he go to his death in disguise and - for the audience in the cinema - somehow save his face, even if he loses it for the sake of the kids. The final scene of White Heat is also going to confront Cagney with the brutalism of technological architecture in giant forms. He ought to be dwarfed by the Hortonsphere, but as the evocation of his Ma makes clear, he sees it just a great metal tit.

White may be the colour of intense heat but it also the colour of milk. It is the heat of milk that is oddly evoked by the customer in Psycho. It is milk that Perkins will bring to Janet Leigh in her chalet. It was milk that glowed with radioactive light in Suspicion and it will be in the guise of an atomic explosion that the Hortonsphere will erupt at the end of White Heat.

"Park across the street. If there's any trouble, give us the horn hard." Cody's instructions to Verna for the big heist may carry a certain innuendo but he wants her at arm's length. Again, she is willing to betray him, this time to the police but they can see through her and will not play.

The final sequence was shot on-location in Torrance, California, in the Hortonsphere area of the refinery. "How do ya like that, Ma?" in Cody's big finale, we do not hear the Mother speaking through him but he is clearly speaking to her. It is Cagney's own wild firing spree which sets off the apocalyptic explosion but it is Fallon, whom he has known throughout as Pardo, who wounds him. Daring to speak the name and killing the thing you love must lead in 1949 to a complete annihilation. Never before or since has the death of a gangster been seen in such apocalyptic terms. Only Kiss Me Deadly and Dr Strangelove dared to push the button during the fifties and sixties, the one a paranoid thriller and the other a black comedy of sexual dysfunction in high places.

By 1960, there was Psycho and a glimpse of fusion. The ending a whimper not a bang. The shower curtain in Psycho may be the last of the veils. In the film, it is clear that by the time she takes her fatal shower, Marion has made up her mind to face her demons and return to Phoenix. The shower has an air of relief and refreshment. In her conversation with Norman, Marion has seen the impossibility of any escape based on the stolen cash. We sense it even before she states that she intends to return and face the music.

For Hitchcock, a curtain was always ready to be penetrated from behind by the barrel of a gun. It's in TMWKTM both versions, Torn Curtain etc. Death by knife is more intimate and he has put the knife in the hands of a woman before, when Sylvia Sydney kills her husband in Sabotage. Grace Kelly uses scissors to stab her assailant in Dial M for Murder. The death of the main character in Psycho was clearly meant to be a violation of the normal. It was as if a knife had been taken to the movie itself. In fact it wounds the film fatally and it crawls to its death an hour later: there is no denying that the second part of Psycho is unworthy of the first part. The detective, the lover and the sister are underdeveloped characters who investigate the loss of the picture's anima - notion which sounds interesting psychologically but turns out to be dramatically impossible. As in Vertigo, the double seems a very poor relation - Hitch's punishment of Vera Miles? The second murder is of an entirely dispensible character, whose call back to Lila & Sam seems implausible. By the time we have them poking around the spooky house, all notion of subverting genres seems to have vanished. All he can do is wind things up with cod psychology.

In White Heat, the anima figure disappears at a similar point. Unlike the endlessly-quoted shower-scene, Ma's death is a reported absence, a hole blown into Cody's already precariously-balanced mind. There is some doubt as to the exact circumstances of the death - Big Ed and Verna are neither reliable witnesses. Probably Verna plugged her from behind but then Verna is a very phallic figure: she has never coddled Cody the way Ma did and the way Pardo does. She literally rides him upstairs to bed and their exchanges throughout the film are combative. The most intimate moments in the film are between Cody and Pardo: the intimate exchanges in the prison cell while their cell-mate snores - shades of Verna's entrance? Later the Gothic wind in the trees scene, where Cody will use the state of his own soul to discourage Pardo from a supposed union with his wife.

Pardo as name suggests a few things: partner, leopard, pardon? Verna isn't exactly redolent of Spring. Joady Carrot would give us a Spoonerism to take on both The Grapes of Wrath and the Carrot of Cagney's hair colour. Fallon is Pardo's real name, suggestive of a fallen man, a fall guy, a guy who is always going down. More suggestively, a guy another guy can fall on. His real name will not do: as one rises another falls. The chosen pseudonym suggests equality but the reality of the power relations is otherwise. The plot of White Heat is to allow Jarrett to think he is on top. It is his own partiality for Pardo which sinks his greatest venture and allows a traitor into the midst of the gang. If Pardo has taken the place of his mother and given him suck when he goes down, it is fitting he should finally go up on a giant metal titty, attached more or less to its fiery, corrosive nipple.

If the Hortonsphere finale represents the nipple, he has got there in a tanker. He rides within and the symbol he has drunk at his mother's lap is that of the Trojan horse. We have seen the tanker much earlier in Cagney's career: in Public Enemy, it is the supposed petrol tanker which syphons drink from the bonded warehouse. The tanker in White Heat has never seen action before. Its virgin nature is stressed - the gang have invested twelve thousand dollars of their own money in its purchase. Their intended job shows such a modest return on the investment that Cagney insists on rewriting the plan for higher stakes. The job must be a child of his own conception and he travels to it inside a symbolic womb. So he remains, sealed in this womb and kept from the fatal knowledge that Pardo is Fallon. The implausible dramaturgy is finessed by Walsh's brisk story-telling powers: Fallon can only be seen as he is at the very end. Ejected from the womb and betrayed by the false tit of Fallon, Cody must ascend to the armour-plated dug of his mother reborn in fire.

This association of Cagney with milk is carried over from his 1939 film with Walsh, The Roaring Twenties. Though it may seem a quintessential Cagney gangster picture, the earlier piece lacks the detailed psychological perversity his characters normally have. Instead it makes a case for him as a loser drawn into the easy-money ethos of prohibition and pathetically left behind when the crash comes. He is the potential good guy who never had a fair crack of the whip after the First World War, weak rather than evil: it is not the sort of part which any star would consent to play these days. We know that Cagney is on the slide in that picture when he stops drinking milk in the speakeasies and resorts to swigging his own hooch. Earlier the copious amounts of lemonade served at a suburban villa turn out to be an indication of the juvenile nature of the girl who has been sending him letters in the trenches. He is such a good guy in this film that he can't wait to get away!

In his attachment to his mother, Jarrett may replace and deny his father. The madman whose fate he denies is one whose fate he needs unconsciously to outdo in madness. His way to the cross must be obscure to himself. This is why the tanker must be new - it represents a new covenant, the virgin womb. His fifty-fifty twin occupies the space with him as befits any heretical text. In charge of the whole business is The Trader, a shadowy figure from Cody's past but hardly of his class. Fallon - when he is still Fallon - plans a fishing vacation. Now he will catch a pretended fisherman, though he is a pretend fisher-of-men himself. The uncovering of The Trader's guise may serve as the final demonstration of Pardo's loyalty to Jarrett, though it is hardly necessary by this time. Cagney's declaration that Pardo is his fifty-fifty partner has a sense of trade about it. There is, I think, no question about who has been on top in the Trader-Cody relationship. About the felationship of Cody and Fallon, there is some doubt. The character of The Trader is one of the most intriguing in movies: we see him only in rôle, kitted out in an elaborate disguise. Clearly he has a long and trusting relationship with Cody but he comes from a very different world.

In the criminal plot, he is the middle-man who disposes of hot currency at around a third of its face value. The gang that Cody has gathered around him seem impervious to such secrets: from the start, Big Ed. is determined to depose the nutcase and impose his own heavyweight leadership. While Ed. is clearly impervious and resolutely, stolidly phallic, Cody seems to stand at the crossroads, belatedly revealing his knowledge of Trade. White Heat is notably not at all concerned with the fate of the Trader. Mister Big has showed up in the final reels, only to escape we assume and fight another day in some Protean guise. Quietly, almost unobserved, as we focus on Jarrett and the unmasking of Pardo, we may all have let slip an altogether more slippery fish.

Perkins and Cagney appear to have attracted rumours of bisexuality in Hollywood. Those about Perkins seem to have been confirmed. Cagney's mother-fixated persona was set early on in a play; his career as a dancer was rumoured to have been aided by various interested patrons.

Cagney was not a beauty by any means but his snub-nosed, red-haired urchin-appeal was appropriate in a juvenile. His cinema career was posited on a very skilful papering over the cracks. He hadn't the build for a heavy, so his toughness had to come from his lightness on his feet and mental volatility. He wasn't made for whole-hearted romance - he was the kid who would kiss a girl and spit it out or pull a face as if offended by the soft stuff. The grapefruit is an extension of this. Those of us - wisely or not - exposed to Cagney movies as kids, may recall the instinctive appeal of that persona. The films may be adult in their implications but Cagney offered a way into that world. If we were reading the films carefully, it was hardly a way in at all but what kid reads carefully? It is one of the marvels of Angels with Dirty Faces, that the Dead End Kids read papers to keep up with their hero. Here was a picture in which Cagney's arrested development could be presented in an uplifting light, though the combination of religion, crime and youth opens the text to less innocent interpretations.

I don't know how much of White Heat was filmed chronologically but it seems as if the early scenes feature a Cagney with an obvious blemish on his lower lip: perhaps a cold-sore or even a growth that had been removed. Anyway, the make-up job does not cover it early on. I think there may be fewer close-ups as the film progresses or we get used to Cagney's face and enjoy the undiminished energy. Truth to tell, it isn't good in that first glimpse we have: grim and determined though he is, it is hard not to feel he looks puffy and punch-drunk.

There was a hint of the ageing midget in Cagney's looks as he got older. He drives to the train hold-up like an old champion wheeled out for a come-back about which few doubt the outcome. It is a cunning and high-risk entrance, to start with Cagney hemmed into a car as he is carried to his destination, only the speed of the car hints that its contents may be highly-explosive. He belies those expectations and once he is up and shooting, the old energy seems to be back with a vengeance. In the final reel of the movie we will see Cagney delivered in even more confined conditions to the scene of a more apocalyptic explosion. He could be seen as a Jack-in-the-Box, the spring tightly compressed also, of course, the rules of the atom demand that the force of the explosion is directed inwards before the core will go critical.

White Heat is above all else an action film so this delving into psychology might seem excessive. How much was intentional? In a dense, fast-moving and high-pressure picture, aren't we just joining a few random dots? It is not my intention to suggest that my meanings were ever intended by anyone before. I do want to suggest that the dark matter of what has previously been unexpressed and maybe inexpressible is not a fog or a mist. Rather, it is a tremendously heavy, dark, rich matter which parts - when it does - along certain seams. Every important work of art may open new faces and almost immediately a flock of lesser miners start chipping away at the surfaces newly exposed. The critics concern themselves with waiting for the dust to settle, carting away the rubble and assessing the usefulness of the new direction. In this strange division of labour, it is hardly ever necessary for anyone to have intentions at all. That does not prevent the rock of this prima materia from having fault-lines. As yet, there is no critical geology which can predict them so we'd prefer to be peering into the débris of the past than predicting the earthquakes to come.

 Return to Film Studies

Return to Main Page

©James Beswick Whitehead, 2006