White Heat

ACCORDING TO Warner Bros.’ publicity spiel of the time, there are 260 scenes in Raoul Walsh’s 1949 White Heat. But there is only one moment that has lodged itself in the pop-culture Hall Of Fame. At the film’s climax, psychotic hoodlum Arthur ‘Cody’ Jarrett (James Cagney) is crouched atop a gas-storage tank, surrounded by the police. Wounded by a blaze of bullets, Jarrett staggers around the platform, giggling and shrieking. The oil refinery starts to explode around him, but rather than cower, Jarrett stands up and shouts, “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” A howl into the void, the line was later voted as the 18th-greatest movie quote by the American Film Institute.

“Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” — it’s often misquoted as, “Top of the world, Ma!” — can be found in Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts’ original screenplay, with the scene description suggesting in brackets that the line reading be delivered “hoarsely”. Inspired by New York murderer Francis Crowley, who was killed in a shoot-out with the police — his final words were, “Send my love to my mother” — and real-life bank-robber Kate Barker, aka Ma Barker, and her sons, Jarrett’s obsession with his mother came from Roberts, who felt the Oedipus complex gave the story the feel of Greek tragedy.

But what wasn’t in the script were Jarrett’s peals of maniacal laughter. They were ad-libbed by Cagney on set. “When he feels something, he just keeps going,” remembered Roberts about Cagney, “and it’s usually very good.”

The climax was filmed at the Signal Hill oil wells, on the grounds of one of Southern California’s largest chemical and oil-refinery plants. With the film shooting in the pre-bullet-squibs age, the production employed pinpoint-accurate marksmen to miss Cagney by mere inches, but when it came to the fiery climax, Raoul Walsh took no chances.

“I happened to be looking at a newsreel one night and I saw this big explosion of this tank,” Walsh remembered. “So I got the company to buy the negatives and we doubleprinted [repeated] it. Jimmy was up there on the tank, but he was never up there when the explosion went off.”

The iconic line has become a shorthand for defiant bravado in the face of certain death, riffed on in films (Britannia Hospital, Tough Guys, The Adventures Of Ford Fairlaine, Richochet, Small Soldiers, Suburbia, Belfast), TV (Cheers, The Simpsons, The Wonder Years, Cracker and, er, Supergran) and music: 50 Cent’s ‘Crazy’, featuring PNB Rock, opens with the line. Less enamoured with the film was Cagney himself, who, in his 1985 autobiography, called it “another cheapjack job”. One man’s top of the world, Ma, is another man’s bottom.

WHITE HEAT IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DIGITAL