Saw White Heat, a James Cagney gangster film. If I had to explain to some foreign person what a gangster film was, I would point to this film. Cagney does the gangster thing, the cops pursue him, a mole in his organization sweats and connives. Cagney's gangster gets intense, debilitating migraines and has this weird fixation on his mother, an old, unsmiling battleaxe of a woman.
I assumed Cagney was supposed to be some grotesque monster, that this would be an intense battle of the noble cops vs a grandiose monster, but there really isn't that much tension and horror in the film. Rather, it's very orderly. The gangsters do one reasonable thing, the cops do another. I never got the sense that the gangster was tantalizingly out of reach, or that he was terribly, untouchably omnipotent. The plot is kind of dry fo a film where so many people die.
It's a solid gangster picture, not the greatest I've seen but not the worst either. Free of tension but also fairly free of hysterics, so maybe it's just not catering to my weaknesses. A very 1950s film. Orderly and composed.
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