good snack / carrots wrote:
srsly though....I don't know why this isn't in the super holy canon. it's for boys and is fuckin good. what say you yoshue?
um its in
my super holy canon
It always seems to take second place to Angels With Dirty Faces in the Cagney gangster cycle--but Heat has none of that film's draggy moralizing and is a much more mature, adult work. Way superior.
Another problem may be that Cagney is such a winning, ingratiating performer that people want to like him--and in all those other gangster films of his, there's an element of redemption, or at least a sense of a good kid going wrong due to forces outside of his control. White Heat, meanwhile, is about a fuckin' Oedipal maniac (and is all the better for it!)
I think it also gets shafted because it showed up ten years after the Warner gangster era ended.
