Portrayals of Mental Illness/Trauma in Film: James Cagney in "White Heat" (1949)

Screenwriters Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts were offered the idea of adapting the Denver Mint robbery of 1922, but they were not 100% inspired by this prompt Warner Brothers bought from Paramount script girl Virginia Kellogg. "We said, "We don't want to do this. It's simply a bank robbery, it's ordinary, conventional, banal." They said, "What would you like to do?" We said, "We'd like to do Ma Barker and have the gangster with a mother complex and play it against Freudian implications that she's driving him to do these things and he's driving himself to self-destruction. Play it like a Greek tragedy." They said, " Fellas . . . ?" We said "Believe us, this will work. And there's only one man who can play this and make the rafters rock. That is Jimmy Cagney." (Obituary: Ivan Goff | The Independent)

Cagney had just won the Academy Award for "Yankee Doodle Dandy" (1942) and a month later announced that he was leaving Warner Brothers a second time. "Movies should be entertaining, not blood baths," he said on one of his last days at Warners, "I'm sick of carrying a gun and beating up women." His brother, actor and producer William Cagney, and himself would establish Cagney Productions through United Artists producing "Johnny Come Lately" (1943) and "Blood on the Sun" (1945). But by 1949, the company had poor returns from both films and found themselves in a legal dispute with the Samuel Goldwyn Studio over a rental agreement. Goff and Roberts's casting suggestion was only met with horror from Warner Brothers, but the idea of Cagney's "tough guy" comeback was too great for either party to ignore.

Soon after taking the role, Cagney came to Hoff and Roberts's office and laid on the couch asking what they were planning to do. "The writers explained that this time they were going for something completely different; not just to show the gangster as a figure of evil, but to show why and where the damage came from. "Well, it sounds interesting. Sounds like it will be fun to play... Whatever you say, fellas."" (Feature: The James Cagney season | Film | The Guardian) Even some of his closest friends added to the script. Frank McHugh would write the film's opening scene where Cody and his gang rob a mail train in the Sierra Nevada mountains, Humphrey Bogart adding to many "after hours" revision sessions as well.

Director Raoul Walsh gave Cagney plenty of room for improvisation as well as on set suggestions. It's still debated who had come up with the idea for Cody to climb into his mother's lap "and sit there; being soothed during one of his psychotic episodes" which Goff would later describe as "something awfully personal" to startled audiences. Walsh was the one to suggest for Cagney to fall from his chair during one of his debilitating headaches then firing off a round from his .45. But the scene in the prison mess hall where Cody is serving three years for a train job and finds out his mother has died, is all Cagney.

"My father had a saloon at Eighty-first Street and First Avenue, just a little place," Cagney explained to Rolling Stone Magazine's Timothy White in 1981, "and he was known as the 'two for one' bartender meaning that he drank two for every one he served. Not a wise way to make a living. In those days, my father thought he had something going simply by running the place, but he was wrong, unfortunately. He was a bookkeeper originally -- that was the irony of it. He also liked to play the horses and ran through a lot of what little money we had. He died in 1918 after a quick bout of the flu. His alcoholism had weakened him to where the bug took him like that." When asked how Cody comes up with making that loud noise in the mess hall, Cagney attributed it mostly to the memory of his own father in his alcoholic fits.