AWARDS & HONORS:

Although many (including co-star Virginia Mayo) thought Cagney's performance should have earned him a second Academy Award®, the only nomination White Heat received was Virginia Kellogg's for Best Story. Kellogg and screenplay writers Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts were all nominated for an Edgar Allen Poe (mystery writers) Award.

The Critics Corner on WHITE HEAT

"Red-hot box office. Raoul Walsh's direction has kept the pace sharp and exciting for the nearly two-hour length." ­ Variety.

"Mr. Cagney, representing a homicidal maniac whose favorite girl is his dear old two-gun mother, comes up with a performance so full of menace that I hereby recommend him for whatever Oscar® is given an artist for rising above the asininity of his producers." ­ John McCarten, The New Yorker.

"To let the kids see Cagney as he was in happier days, Warner Brothers has produced a wild and exciting mixture of mayhem called White Heat.... They screech with joy when the hero begins pummeling society with both hands and both feet, a tigerish snarl on his lips. The old Jimmy is back again." ­ Life.

"Cagney plays it with such dynamic arrogance, such beautiful laying out of detail, that he gives the whole picture a high charge.... Director Raoul Walsh has gathered vivid acting from his whole cast. Miss Mayo, in fact, is excellent as the gangster's disloyal spouse ­ brassy, voluptuous and stupid to just the right degree. Edmond O'Brien does a slick job.... Steve Cochran is ugly as an outlaw, John Archer is stout...and Margaret Wycherly is darkly invidious as the gangster's beloved old 'ma.'" ­ Bosley Crowther, The New York Times.

"White Heat is in the hurtling tabloid tradition of the gangster movies of the '30s, but its matter-of-fact violence is a new, postwar style." ­ Time.

"Fred Astaire dancing, Wallace Beery squinting one eye. Garbo's sniff. Clark Gable's silly smile and Cagney's lightning fist are things you remember in a decade's film going ­ and Cagney's fist (bless it) is here with us again after years of rest." ­ Paul Holt, London's Daily Herald.

"Mr. Cagney is never less than an actor of experience and competence who knows precisely what he is doing. The trouble is that this particular part is one he knows all too well." ­ The Times (London).

"This Freudian gangster picture...is very obvious, and it's so primitive and outrageous in its flamboyance that it seems to have been made much earlier than it was. But this flamboyance is also what makes some of its scenes stay with you.... [Cagney] does his most operatic acting in this film, and he has his wildest death scene: he literally explodes." ­ Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies.

"The most gruesome aggregation of brutalities ever presented under the guise of entertainment." - Cue.

"This searing melodrama reintroduced the old Cagney and then some: spellbinding suspense sequences complemented his vivid and hypnotic portrayal." - Halliwell's Film & Video Guide.

Compiled by Rob Nixon