TSPDT placing: #257
Directed by: Raoul Walsh
Written by: Virginia Kellogg (story), Ivan Goff (screenplay), Ben Roberts (screenplay)
Starring: James Cagney, Virginia Mayo, Edmond O'Brien, Margaret Wycherly, Steve Cochran, John Archer, Wally Cassell, Fred Clark
WARNING: Plot and/or ending details may follow!!!
When it comes to gangsters, nobody could play 'em quite like James Cagney. White Heat (1949) is often considered to feature his finest performance, and the film certain delivers the promised thrills and suspense. Disturbed, violent and volatile, Cody Jarrett is a dangerous crook with a short fuse, and, for the dedicated undercover detective who has secured the criminal's trust, a single blunder could betray his identity, and the game would be up. Raoul Walsh, who had directed Cagney on three previous occasions, was well-versed in the gangster genre, and had already imbued it with shades of early noir in the star-making Humphrey Bogart picture, High Sierra (1941). Cagney, after acclaimed performances in The Public Enemy (1931), Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) and The Roaring Twenties (1939), had taken a decade-long recess from playing a gangster, and, as Cody Jarrett, he exploded onto the screen with more intensity than ever. Exhibiting an unhealthy intimacy with his overbearing mother, Jarrett's extreme mental sickness is most memorably observed in his final deranged words: "Made it, Ma. Top of the world!"
Unlike some gangster pictures, which tend to take a few minutes to swing into gear, White Heat opens with a daring railway robbery, in which Jarrett and his gang murder four innocent men and flee with thousands of dollars in cash. In order to escape the gas chamber, the master-criminal surrenders to the authorities and claims responsibility for a minor hotel heist, receiving 1-3 years imprisonment but eluding suspicions that he played a role in the bloody train robbery. The detectives in charge, however, remain unconvinced, and dedicated undercover agent Hank Fallon (Edmond O'Brien) is sent to the prison to gain Jarrett's trust and acquire evidence of his involvement in the crime. Meanwhile, opportunistic femme fatale, Verna (Virginia Mayo), plays a deadly game with treacherous associate Big Ed (Steve Cochran), while Jarrett's predatory mother (Margaret Wycherly) seethes ominously in the shadows. When Jarrett and a gang of lackeys stage an exciting jail-break, Fallon attempts to alert the authorities to his latest movements – but this felon isn't going to take failure lying down.
White Heat played an important role in the development of the heist picture sub-genre, and, like Walsh's High Sierra (1941) years earlier, paved the way for the classic and influential narrative formula to be found in John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950). With Cagney always brimming with pent-up violent energy, his character consistently maintains a state of extreme volatility – his mental breakdown during the prison meal is gripping and realistic – and, as a result, the story never allows the viewer to flag their concentration. Edmond O'Brien is also excellent as the honest undercover investigator who earns Jarrett's trust before betraying it, and there's a wonderful moral ambiguity in the sense that we, as the audience, have grown so attached to the charismatic and unpredictable villain that we're almost cheering for his success. That Cody Jarrett is doomed from the very beginning is a fact forever present in our minds, and that's what makes his inevitable downfall even more tragic, devastating and unforgettable. At that moment, James Cagney really was at the top of the world.
8/10
Currently my #2 film of 1949:
1) The Third Man (Carol Reed)
2) White Heat (Raoul Walsh)
3) Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer)
4) A Run for Your Money (Charles Frend)
5) Nora inu {Stray Dog} (Akira Kurosawa)
A perfect example of the film's style of satire can be found early on, after veteran news anchorman Howard Beale (Peter Finch) learns that he is to be fired in two weeks' time, on account of poor ratings. The following evening, Beale calmly announces to millions of Americans his intentions to commit suicide on the air in a week's time. The show's technicians idly go about their duties, oblivious to what their star has just proclaimed, before one employee tentatively ventures, "uh, did you hear what Howard just said?" The network, in their ongoing quest for high ratings, was so blindly obsessed with perfecting all their technical aspects that the mental-derangement of their leading anchorman went almost completely unnoticed. At first, there is an attempt to yank Beale from the air, but one forward-thinking producer, Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), proposes that the network could double their current ratings by keeping him in the spotlight. 
Peter Finch, who was awarded a posthumous Best Actor Oscar for his performance, is simply explosive as the unhinged anchorman whose volatile outbursts of derangement are celebrated by a society which, in a better world, should be trying to help him. Beale's memorable catch-cry – "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" – symbolises his revulsion towards the crumbling values of today's society, and, as fanatical as he might be, most of his raves are worryingly close to the truth. William Holden is also excellent as Max Schumacher, Beale's long-time colleague, who resents the networks' treatment of his friend, but does little to interfere. Schumacher's adulterous relationship with the seductive but soulless Diana (Dunaway) consciously follows the conventional path of a television soap opera, ending with the realisation that his affair with the ratings-obsessed mistress is sapping him of any real emotion or humanity; in Schumacher's own words, "after living with you for six months, I'm turning into one of your scripts." Television corrupts life.
Love and Death (1975) was obviously produced shortly after an Ingmar Bergman marathon, and the film is both an affectionate homage and an enjoyable spoof of The Seventh Seal (1957), Bergman's memorable meditation on the nature of religion and death. The perfect bittersweet ending sees Death, cloaked in a white sheet, leading our hero in a Danse Macabre across the countryside. Also targeted by Allen's razor-sharp flair for parody are the epic Russian novels of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, such as "Crime and Punishment," "The Idiot" and "War and Peace." A singularly-absurd recreation of the Battle of Waterloo, which – among other anachronisms – is catered by a New York hot-dog vendor, is also an amusing send-up of Sergei Bondarchuk's impressive box-office disaster Waterloo (1970), and even Bonaparte himself makes a surprise appearance as both an assassination target, and to demand the completion of the pastry to be named in his honour {we call them vanilla slices down here in Australia}.
Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, in their third of many collaborations, work together perfectly as cousins (and later partners) who like to bicker endlessly about the meaning of life, their conversations descending swiftly into dubious pseudo-philosophical ramblings of which I was able to make neither head nor tail. With the exception of one bottle gag that wouldn't have been out of place in a Chaplin film, most of the humour is purely verbal, and Allen even experiments with breaking the fourth wall, a style of comedy that he would implement with astonishing success in Annie Hall. In terms of story, Love and Death, in spite of its episodic nature, comes together more completely than any of Allen's previous films, and the jokes are consistently funny enough to draw a laugh. Considerably funnier than that other famous historical comedy released in 1975 (if I may be so bold), this is one of Woody Allen's funniest movies, with more than enough intelligent humour to go around.
If any director was most suited to adapt "Doctor Zhivago," Boris Pasternak's mighty retelling of a difficult era in Russia's history, it was, indeed, David Lean. As was the case in his previous film, the plot itself comes second to the director's astonishing ability to capture the majesty of every instant, and to place the audience in the midst of the moment. As such, Doctor Zhivago (1965) lacks any straightforward narrative, but its strength is drawn from the incredible emotion that accompanies each turn in events: it's a story of love, loss, hope, war, family, revolution and death… basically, everything that makes life worth living. Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif) stumbles passively through the turmoil that is Russia during the 1910s, both before and after the onslaught of WWI, and through his submissive eyes we watch citizens acclimatise to the constantly-shifting political climates of the era. During the Revolution of 1917, and the subsequent Russian Civil War, one's very existence was forever in doubt, and the uncertainty of the times consistently casts an ominous shadow over the fate of the film's major characters.
Filming for Doctor Zhivago, as was the case in Lawrence of Arabia, was a long and gruelling experience for all involved. As Pasternak's novel was still banned in the Soviet Union at the time of the film's production {it would not be officially published there until 1988, though several earlier samizdat editions could be found}, filming took place primarily in Spain, with several sequences also shot in Finland and Canada. This extensive location-shooting allowed Lean to accurately reproduce the splendour of the Russian wilderness: the bitter cold of the snow-swept winter landscapes, the vibrancy of the fresh and chilled summers. An entire Moscow city-block was recreated just outside Madrid, and it would take a sharp eye to discern that the icy cobbled streets of the film's opening act are not located in the Russian capital. Such are the scenes' authenticity that you shiver at the very thought of stepping outside into the falling snow, and, as Zhivago – encrusted in a numbing case of ice – trudges stiffly through the winterscape, we can almost feel our own limbs becoming numb with frostbite.
Rarely has an epic delivered such an impressive display of acting performances. Omar Sharif, who was apparently surprised to have landed the lead character in David Lean's latest, doesn't initially strike one as being "leading man" material, but it is his passiveness in the role that proves crucial to the telling of Pasternak's story. He wanders dutifully through the changing landscape of Russia, rarely saying what he truly believes, and never displaying any genuine outbursts of emotion; he is a ghost of a person, and simply perseveres through his belief that better times are yet to come. Zhivago's primary emotional outlet is through his poetry, through which he articulates his passions and anguishes, though he only finds himself able to write when he finds himself in a comfortable living situation. His work has been condemned by the government for focusing on personal sentiments rather than the "good of the state," an ironic foreshadowing of the censorship that Pasternak himself would encounter. Nevertheless, Zhivago comes across as quite a cold and detached character, and there's a selfishness inherent in his decision not to pursue his estranged family to Paris.
Julie Christie provides the film's primary love interest, an abused and neglected woman in whom Zhivago finds an illicit companionship. Independent, and yet very vulnerable, Lara forms the emotional core of the story, and it is through her association with the lead character that he is able to divulge his true feelings and pen his finest work. Geraldine Chaplin (for better or worse, a spitting image of her father) is also quite good as Zhivago's wife, Tonya, though her presence – perhaps intentionally – fails to evoke the same glamour and compassion as is the case with Lara. Rod Steiger, who has been greatly impressing me of late, is a slimy figure of egotism and malevolence ("...and don't delude yourself this was rape, that would flatter us both"), though his deeds in the film's final act raise a level of ambiguity that is interesting to ponder: why, indeed, did he arrive to offer Lara warning? The motives of Gen. Yevgraf Zhivago, played by the great Alec Guinness, are similarly uncertain, and his apparent detachedness - almost indifference - to the plight of his half-brother is a puzzling riddle that only a second viewing could possibly resolve.
Into the rubble-strewn ruins of Vienna comes an American pulp-novelist, Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), who arrives, without a dime in his pocket, in search of an old friend named Harry Lime. However, upon his arrival, Martins is horrified to to learn of Lime's tragic death in a traffic accident. Unsatsified with the explanations he receives from the authorities and witnesses, he teams up with Lime's ex-girlfriend Anna Schmidt (Aldi Valli) to solve the mystery of his best friend's death. Was it an accident? Was it murder? Who was the "third man" who was seen carrying Lime to the roadside? Of course, as you and I both know, Martins' childhood friend, having faked his own death, is very much alive, and intent on keeping his continued existence quiet. The extraordinary moment, when Harry Lime's face is abruptly illuminated in a doorway, as a cat affectionately nuzzles his shoes, hardly comes as a surprise after fifty years, but the magic is very much still there.
Orson Welles' amused boyish smirk, wryly taunting Martins across the roadway, signals the entrance of one of cinema's most charismatic supporting characters. Despite being absent for the first half of the film, Lime's presence is felt throughout, his darkened shadow continually towering over Martins as he seeks to ascertain the actual cause of his friend's death. Lime is a perfect example of cinema's anti-hero, a vibrant, likable and identifiable personality who commits atrocities that should immediately warrant our detestation. Graham Greene's brisk and intelligent screenplay gives Lime all the best lines, particularly on the Ferris Wheel ride when he muses on the value of those inconsequential "little dots" walking below, though Welles himself takes credit for penning the celebrated "cuckoo clock" monologue; a rapidly-delivered acknowledgment of the creativity born from "warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed." Though Welles justifiably receives a lot of the praise, every other cast member delivers a wonderful performance, particularly Cotten as the bemused and morally-conflicted foreigner, Valli as Lime's steadfast lifelong disciple, and Trevor Howard as the Major who very much wishes that Lime had remained underground.
Director Carol Reed famously clashed with producer David O. Selznick over various facets of the film's production, with Selznick insisting on pivotal casting decisions, and allegedly suggesting that the film be titled "Night Time in Vienna." However, in the case of the suitably downbeat ending, both producer and director saw eye-to-eye, and Greene's original optimistic conclusion (in which Holly and Anna reconcile) was shelved in favour of the wonderful static long-shot, in which Martins is completely ignored by the women whose trust he is perceived to have broken. The Third Man, perhaps as a result of these contradictory artistic influences, has acquired, like no other film I've seen, a distinct personality of its own. Karas' zither soundtrack, as though consciously flouting traditional noir conventions, adds an element of whimsy to the proceedings, and somehow complements perfectly the larger-than-life distortion of Krasker's photography, in which ordinary human shadows tower three storeys in height, and even the most commonplace of interactions takes on the warped dimensions of a drug-induced dream. In Vienna, the truth can be as elusive as a ghost.
8 years ago
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