Critic Reviews

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.

Talk about your baby boys – Cagney takes the cake here as a psychopathic gangster with a seriously perverse mother complex. A gangster classic.

Perhaps the roughest of the classic gangster movies, with a climax that almost blows the theater down. [24 Jul 2009, p.C3]

Magnificent examination of the criminal mind and Cagney's finest moment.

Walsh’s White Heat, starring Cagney in great form as psychotic mamma’s boy Cody Jarrett, is shot by shot, frame by frame, the hard-boiled masterpiece of the bunch.

White Heat is to the gangster genre what The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly was to Westerns: it took all the clichés, tropes and general violence of its genre and made it into art.

That the movie presents Cody as so iredeemably destructive, yet somehow makes you feel for him anyway, is the kind of storytelling magic that’s hard to explain or quantify. Thanks to the writing, the filmmaking, and especially Cagney's performance, you end up caring for this horrendous man, or at least understanding his pain and the demons that drive him.

WHITE HEAT is primal, flamboyant stuff--close your eyes and you could be watching a 30s picture. But don't close them more than momentarily; the film's visuals make it linger in the mind's eye.

In Raoul Walsh's potent portrayal of a criminal gang roving backroads America, Cagney permanently redefined psychopathic criminality in the movies. [22 May 2005, p.25]

What makes the famous 1949 Raoul Walsh gangster film White Heat a classic is its crackling tension that derives from Walsh's breakneck pace and the developing psychological complexity of James Cagney's Cody Jarrett. [21 Oct 1990, p.6]