Popular reviews

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  Review by Todd Gaines ★★★★ 19

  James Cagney as a crazy gangsta who loves his Ma, tolerates his wife, and lives to rob and kill. Choo choo train. Dangerous thermos. Leap of faith. The way James Cagney holds a pistol. Kinda-hot water. Sexy snoring. The Invisible Man? Accidental discharge. Poco loco. Ma knows best. Whiskey cures everything. The way James Cagney establishes dominance. Doctor Death? The ABC game. Ma drives like Gos in Drive. Undercover Wild Freddie Sykes. Holy Fuck! The Raid 2 copied White Heat. Lip reader. A reindeer? Real motherfuckers don't need vaccination shots. Mirror communication. Close call. Crazy spell. Worst lawyer ever. Terrible news. Jailhouse meltdown. Dr. Lecter's straight jacket. Yucky soup. Escaping like a boss. Old school car phones are the shit.…

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★★½

  89/100

  Pure pleasure. Cagney's such a force of nature that I'd forgotten how much of the movie is told from the cops' perspective, and how much delectable suspense Walsh and the writers milk from the undercover scenario. Even our current Golden Age Of TV Drama, in which plotting has (thank christ) become respectable again, rarely offers bits as choice as Cagney opening the envelope containing the framed photo of O'Brien's fake wife and putting it out in the cell as a gag, to see what O'Brien does when he notices...if he notices, we suddenly realize, 'cause O'Brien's never seen this woman in his life. There's even a lengthy tutorial on how to use three separate cars to trail somebody without…

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★★

  There are very few films that are as prudent and as sustainedly controlled in their storytelling as Raoul Walsh’s White Heat. Starring James Cagney in a powerhouse performance as Arthur "Cody" Jarrett, it delivers a volatile completion to Warner Brother's rotation of gangster movies which started in 1931 with Little Caesar. It abides as possibly the pinnacle performance in Cagney’s lengthy and diverse career, as well as being the movie that contains the frequently misquoted "Made it, Ma! Top of the world!". It’s all riveted together beautifully by Walsh's vehement and polished direction and unhesitatingly stands as one of the most pre-eminent of all gangster epics.

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  Review by Ethan Colburn ★★★★ 3

  Great Cagney performance in a pretty gripping gangster movie. 

  Cagney returns to the gangster performances that he became known for in the 30s, and reunited with Raoul Walsh, who both seem to get each other perfectly. Cagney plays a charismatic gangster, who is electric and evil, and who you find yourself loving throughout despite his actions. The chase scenes in this also hold up.

  You sort of wish this film had the freedom from the Hays code it deserves, where it could show a grittier prison and allow for more creative freedom, however given the time it’s quite intense.

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  Review by chavel ★★★★½

  Compulsive with blowing away expendable men, set off by the most casual of backstabbers, the outlaw Cody Jarrett lets himself be quick to sudden rage. Betrayed by turncoats, betrayed by his two-timing wife, betrayed by the universe in general as brought on in the form of splitting headaches (“it’s like having a red-hot buzzsaw inside my head”), Cody’s only solace is Ma, whom heals with that mothering touch of hers and those devil whispers of barbarous encouragement in his ear. That beats anything his wife can give him, or anything money can supply to him. By the end of this classic unhinged film noir tale, Cody is up above chemical plant tanks lit on fire, and he’s such a screw-loose…

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  Review by Kevin Chan ★★★★ 2

  During an early 2013 winter, a friend of mine partook in a very small and independent stage production of one of my favorite novels, Of Mice and Men, as Candy, the innocent old ranchman. Alongside him was a somewhat portly and energized individual playing the role of Curley, the ranch boss’ brash son. At the play’s end, the actors sat onstage to discuss & answer questions regarding their methods of approaching their roles. With a few hands eagerly raised, Curley’s actor was asked if there was one actor who influenced his take on Steinbeck’s character. He responded that he watched “everything & anything starring James Cagney” so as to grasp the pugnacious and spontaneous delivery required of the role. Since then, the name…

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  Review by K. Austin Collins

  i too have had to replace motherly affection with the attention of strapping, handsome but ultimately deceitful men

  
  this is worth studying for the interpersonal scams alone

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  Review by watchacid ★★★★★

  Just one of the greatest... ever. Amazing how this flick from 1949 has aged so, so, so incredibly well - just like The Treasure of the Sierra Made, released one year prior to White Heat. These just get better every single time you watch them.

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  Review by Ryley Mann ★★★★½ 2

  Amazing

  "Made it, Ma! Top of the world!"

  Now that's how you end a fucking movie.

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★★

  James Cagney in “White Heat” gives a resoundingly definitive performance as an unhinged, psychopathic criminal. The DNA of Cagney’s gangster Cody Jarrett is so powerful that it’s still propagating in great roles of today — from Tommy DeVito in “Goodfellas” to the Joker in “Dark Knight.” 

  Director Raul Walsh also deserves near equal kudos for his taught sensibility that essentially allows him to wrap a gangster flic, a heist film, and a prison break movie into a run time under two hours. 

  Cagney’s pure chaos matched against Walsh’s tight cohesiveness is a mix of fire and powder that explode into one of the most perfect movies ever made.

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  Review by Sam Van Hallgren ★★★★★ 2

  You know how we all spent our youths laughing at Christian Slater for making a career out of a bad Jack Nicholson impression? (Not entirely fair, I realize, but stick with me.) I can imagine folks in the late 60s saying the same thing about Nicholson ripping off Jimmy Cagney. I thought a lot of Nicholson's Joker during this movie's famous (and just plain awesome) finale.

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  Review by sakana1 ★★★★ 6

  "We'd like to do Ma Barker and have the gangster with a mother complex and play it against Freudian implications that she's driving him to do these things, and he's driving himself to self-destruction. Play it like a Greek tragedy." They said, "Fellas ... ?" We said, "Believe us, it will work. And there's only one man who can play this and make the rafters rock."*

  One of the keys to virtually every James Cagney performance is the warmth of his characters. Even when we dislike the men he plays, they have a charm and a dynamism to them that is undeniable, and very nearly impossible to resist. As Cody Jarrett in White Heat, though, Cagney does something completely different,…