Was the Classic, Raoul Walsh/Jimmy Cagney Gangster Movie, White Heat (1949), a Product of Anti-Communist Hysteria?

[A postscript to: “See one of Jimmy Cagney’s Greatest Performances, Starring in Raoul Walsh's Classic Gangster Movie, White
Heat (1949), with Virginia Mayo, Edmond O'Brien, Steve Cochran and Margaret Wycherly, on TCM's Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12 a.m. ET (and 10 a.m. ET Sunday Morning)”]
 

 

By Nicholas Stix

Leave it to Red Eddie Muller, to come up with a political angle to White Heat, in order to promote communism.

In his “outro,” Muller asserted that White Heat depicted villain-protagonist Cody Jarret’s criminality as being caused by family insanity, rather than “social” causes, in contrast to Warner Brothers’ 1930s’ gangster pictures, due to the Red Scare.

As authority for this thesis, Muller cites the book-length essay, Film in the Battle of Ideas (1953), by John Howard Lawson, which discussed White Heat, and which Muller quotes at length.

Lawson argued that criminals are created by “society.” He talked about how his fellow convicts responded to White Heat (career criminals, not Hollywood millionaires), and how they warmed to the notion that they were victims of society. Well, duh!

According to Muller/Lawson, the 1930s Warner Brothers gangster pictures presented criminals as victims of society. This is just longtime, Marxist sloganeering, the same you’ll hear from the “experts” in every Department of Marxist Sociology, every Department of Marxist Political Science, Department of Marxist Geography, Department of Marxist Anthropology, Department of Marxist Feminism, etc. (to paraphrase good Craig Roberts).

The only 1930s Warner Brothers picture that comes anywhere near to the Red slogan would be The Roaring Twenties (1939), in which Jimmy Cagney’s protagonist goes into a life of crime after his taxi stand employer welshes on his promise to re-hire him, after he returns from the Great War.

Muller emphasized that Lawson was one of the Hollywood Ten, all of whom were briefly imprisoned for contempt of Congress. In Red Eddie’s book, that makes Lawson and the other nine all “victims” of so-called McCarthyism.

In reality, Lawson and the other nine were all card-carrying Communists, i.e., members of the Communist Party USA. When they appeared before Congress, some of them delivered nonsensical speeches that had been written for them by party propagandists in Russia, and delivered to their party lawyers in America.

And John Howard Lawson wasn’t just any Communist. He was the CPUSA’s chief enforcer of party dogma in Hollywood. (Red Eddie tells viewers none of this.)

Their dream was to eliminate America’s form of republican self-government under the rule of law and market economy, and replace it with a totalitarian, Communist dictatorship, in which all civil liberties, rule of law, and private property have been abolished, and in which state terror and genocide are the order of the day. In other words, just like the
Soviet Union.

That is a reality towards which we are presently galloping.

But to return to Red Eddie, he and Lawson misrepresented both Warner Brothers’ Golden Age gangster movies, and the ones after the war.

Let’s look at Warner’s most famous pre-war gangster pictures, or pictures in which a gangster is a major figure.

1930 The Big House
1931 Little Caesar
1931 The Secret 6
1931 A Free Soul
1931 The Public Enemy
1932 Scarface
1935 The Petrified Forest
1937 Dead End
1938 Angels with Dirty Faces
1939 The Roaring Twenties
1941 High Sierra

The only one that comes close to supporting the Marxist dogma promoted by Red Eddie and Lawson was Angels. And White Heat makes no general claim that criminality is caused by madness, congenital or otherwise. The rest of the many criminals are just stupid and greedy.

Thus, John Howard Lawson and Eddie Muller were not talking at all about American gangster movies. Rather, they were just talking as Reds, the way they would talk about anything and everything.