Movie Details
| Title: | White Heat | |
| Director: | Raoul Walsh | |
| Year: | 1949 | |
| Genre: | Noir | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 04.18.06 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 04.18.06 | DVR | TCM ran this awesome awesome movie that I don't have on DVD yet so I decided to record it and watch it months and months later. It really is a great movie with perhaps my favorite Cagney performance, an awesomely understated performance by Edmond O'Brien (see him a year later in D.O.A. to see why I call it understated) and the uberhot Virginia Mayo fatale-ing it up. I also love the attention to detail with the police tracking tactics of the time. I guess a lot of 40s noirs paid attention to this (the polygraph test in Call Northside 777 comes to mind) and although I guess I should be bored by it I'm always fascinated. You can really see the roots of Dragnet's popularity here and I suppose what is now Law & Order and CSI and all those procedural shows on TV. But it's definitely Cagney and also Raoul Walsh that make this movie a classic badass noir... it's long but never seems slow, it's complicated but never complex, and there are absolutely no frills. great movie. |
