A Film Canon

This terrifying film condenses gangster 'Cody' Jarrett (Jimmy Cagney) to a volatile mass of static, imbuing his insane cruelty with an amorphous, unpredictable autonomy that ultimately renders it indistinguishable from the contemporary L.A. cityscape, and ensures that, unlike Key Largo, he displays absolutely no recollection, let alone nostalgia, for the New York Prohibition heyday, instead celebrating a "sweet racket, in keeping with the times". To this end, Walsh suffuses everything with a tipsy, vertiginous insanity - from the the curving roads and railway line that frame the first heist, to the winds that whip around the house where Cody and his men hide out prior to the last - as well as building the third act around the relationship between Cody's movement through a series of increasingly confined, flammable spaces, and the whole spectrum of police technology brought to bear upon tracking it, culminating with a total collapse of the two that finds most poetic expression in Cody's suicidal sequestration of himself in the heart of a chemical factory - a space that is too flammable to sustain direct fire - thereby explicating his trajectory as one of systematic self-immolation, as well as diagnosing the L.A. cityscape with an unbearable, splitting headache. Even the few brief resurgences of Cagney's trademark, paternalistic charisma are deflected through this static and, more specifically, through the "fierce psychopathic devotion" to his mother (Margaret Wycherly), and proportionate disdain for his lover (Virginia Mayo), that is held accountable for it, culminating with his astonished betrayal at the hands of an undercover policeman (Edmond O'Brien) whom he claims to have treated like "a kid brother", but whose role consists more in delicately providing a surrogate maternal presence - a fleeting balm to "the red-hot buzz-saw inside my head".