Top of the World
The camera is looking up at a man standing on top of a giant steel gas tank, with flames all around him and police rifles pointed up at him from below. He is bleeding, he is laughing, and he is shouting to a mother who is not there. “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” Then he fires his gun into the tank beneath his feet, and the whole world goes up in fire. It is the last thing Cody Jarrett ever says, and it is one of the most famous last lines in the history of the movies.
The film is White Heat, released in 1949 and directed by Raoul Walsh, and the man on the tank is James Cagney, fifty years old, playing a gangster for the first time in years. The line he shouts was later voted the eighteenth greatest movie quotation of all time by the American Film Institute, and the film itself was voted the fourth greatest gangster film ever made. But the line and the explosion are only the ending. The story behind Cody Jarrett is the story of how Cagney took the gangster he had created eighteen years earlier and turned him into something far darker.
Cody Jarrett is not Tom Powers grown up. He is Tom Powers without the charm, without the jokes, and without the conscience. He is a psychopath who loves only his mother, trusts no one else, and kills without hesitation. Cagney played him with a ferocity that still shocks audiences today, and he did it at an age when most stars were settling into comfortable character parts. It was, by common consent, the greatest performance of his career.
The Return of the Gangster
By 1949, Cagney had spent nearly two decades trying to escape the gangster. He had won his Academy Award for playing the song-and-dance man George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy in 1942, he had played a priest, a farmer, a sea captain and a Broadway producer, and he had formed his own production company with his brother William. He had proved, many times over, that he was far more than Tom Powers. So why go back?
The other part of the answer is that Cagney himself is said to have suggested the story, proposing a film about a real-life gangster and his mother, the notorious Ma Barker and her son Arthur “Doc” Barker. Whether that account is exactly right is hard to prove, and it should be treated as the story as it has been told, not as settled fact. What is certain is that the film that emerged was not a simple return to the 1930s. It was a post-war film, darker, more psychological and more violent, and Cagney knew it.
Ma and Cody
The heart of White Heat is not a robbery or a prison break. It is a mother and her son. Ma Jarrett, played by Margaret Wycherly, is the only person Cody loves and the only person he trusts. She runs the gang with him, she plans the robberies, and she soothes him when the terrible headaches that plague him turn into something like a seizure. In the film’s most disturbing scene, she sits the grown man in her lap and rocks him like a child until the pain passes.
Cody’s devotion to his mother is absolute, and it is also terrifying, because it is the only tender feeling he has. He is cold to his wife Verna, played by Virginia Mayo, and he is suspicious of every man in his gang. But with Ma he is a little boy again, and Cagney plays those scenes with a softness that makes the violence that follows them even more shocking. The contrast is the performance. One moment he is a child in his mother’s arms, and the next he is a killer.
The toast the two of them share early in the film gives the whole story its shape. Ma and Cody raise their glasses and say, “Top of the world!” It is a joke between them, a mother’s promise that her boy will rise to the top. When Cody shouts the line at the end of the film, standing on the gas tank with his mother dead and his world in ruins, he is keeping that promise in the only way he has left. He is on top of the world, and there is nothing below him but fire.
The Man Inside
White Heat is built like a trap, and the trap is a man named Hank Fallon, played by Edmond O’Brien. Fallon is an undercover Treasury agent who gets himself sent to the same prison as Cody, under the name Vic Pardo, and sets out to win the gangster’s trust. He saves Cody’s life in a prison fight, he listens to him, and slowly, carefully, he becomes the closest thing Cody has to a friend. It is one of the great undercover performances in the movies, and it works because O’Brien plays it so quietly.
The Mess Hall
The most famous scene in White Heat after the finale takes place in a prison mess hall, and it contains almost no action at all. Cody has just learned that his mother is dead, murdered while he was in prison, and he sits at a long table with hundreds of other prisoners, trying to take it in. Then something breaks inside him. He stands up, he screams, he throws his tray, and he collapses in a fit of grief and rage that takes half a dozen guards to control.
It is one of the most extraordinary pieces of acting ever put on film. Cagney does not play grief as sadness. He plays it as a physical catastrophe, a man whose body cannot contain what he feels. He howls, he shakes, he claws at the air, and for a few seconds he seems genuinely out of his mind. Audiences in 1949 had never seen anything like it, and audiences today still flinch. It is the moment when Cody Jarrett stops being a gangster and becomes a tragedy.
Walsh films the scene without flinching and without cutting away. The camera stays on Cagney, and the other prisoners watch in silence, and the guards move in slowly, as if they are afraid of him. The scene works because Cagney had earned it. We have seen how much he loves his mother, we have seen how little else he loves, and we understand, in a single terrible moment, that with her death his last connection to the human world is gone. After the mess hall, there is nothing left for Cody but revenge.
Verna and Big Ed
Cody is betrayed, in the end, by the two people closest to him after his mother. His wife Verna, played by Virginia Mayo, is beautiful, faithless and frightened, and she has been carrying on with Big Ed Somers, played by Steve Cochran, Cody’s ambitious lieutenant. While Cody is in prison, Big Ed takes over the gang, and Verna helps him, and together they arrange Ma’s murder. It is a sordid, grubby betrayal, and it is entirely in keeping with the world of the film, where loyalty is a luxury no one can afford.
Mayo plays Verna as a woman who married a monster because she liked the money and the excitement, and who now wants out. She is not evil in the way Cody is evil. She is selfish, and frightened, and tired of living with a man who loves his mother more than he loves her. Cagney and Mayo make a fascinating pair, because she is the only person in the film who is not afraid of Cody in the usual way. She is afraid of what he will do when he finds out the truth, and she is right to be.
The Refinery
The last twenty minutes of White Heat take place at an oil refinery in Torrance, California, where Cody and his remaining men have gone to pull off a payroll robbery. The police, tipped off by Hank, are waiting for them, and the robbery turns into a siege. One by one, Cody’s men are killed or captured, until he is alone on top of a giant gas storage tank, with a rifle, a machine gun and nowhere left to go. It is one of the great climaxes in American film, and it was shot on a real refinery, which gives it a scale and a danger that no studio set could match.
Cody climbs to the top of the tank because there is nowhere else to climb. He has lost his mother, his gang, his wife and his freedom, and all he has left is the promise he made to Ma. He shouts it to the sky, to the police below, and to a mother who cannot hear him. “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” Then he fires into the tank, and the explosion that follows is enormous, a ball of fire that fills the screen. It is the most spectacular death any screen gangster had ever been given, and it was entirely appropriate, because Cody Jarrett was the most spectacular screen gangster there had ever been.
The film was a success, and its reputation has only grown. In 2003 the Library of Congress selected White Heat for preservation in the National Film Registry, as a film of cultural, historical and aesthetic significance. The American Film Institute ranked its famous line eighteenth among the greatest movie quotations of all time, ranked Cody Jarrett twenty-sixth among the great screen villains, and ranked the film fourth among the greatest American gangster films. Those are official honours, and they are deserved, but the real measure of the film is simpler. Decades later, people still know the line, and they still know the man who shouted it.
Why Cody Still Frightens Us
Cody Jarrett still frightens us because he is not a cartoon. He is a man with a headache, a mother he adores, a friend he trusts, and a capacity for murder that has no limit. Cagney refuses to explain him away, and Walsh refuses to soften him. There is no childhood trauma offered as an excuse, no social message, no redemption. There is only a man, and the damage he does, and the fire he dies in. That honesty is what makes the film modern, and it is why it has outlasted so many of its contemporaries.
The gangster film has changed many times since 1949, and it will change again, but Cody Jarrett remains its purest expression. He is the boy from the streets who grew up to be a monster, the son who loved his mother too much, and the criminal who would rather burn than surrender. When he climbs to the top of the tank and shouts to his dead mother, he is not just ending a film. He is ending an era, the era of the Warner Bros. gangster that Cagney himself had begun eighteen years earlier. He began it, and he ended it, on top of the world.