From my original White Heat Thread I created so long ago:
This movie is a gay romance between a psychopathic killer and an undercover cop. This much I am certain of.
After watching TCM's doc on the Warner Brother's gangster movies (Public Enemies, I believe it was called, very good), I decided to record this and Public Enemy. Sadly, Public Enemy didn't record properly, so this, the last hurrah of the golden era of the gangster film, ended up being the first one I ever watched. Films like this are always pretty dated because they're films about nasty violent men in a time where films weren't really allowed to be nasty and violent, but Cagney's performance is enough that it still works as a legitimately entertaining film. The only really unbearable part is the first act's big action setpiece, which consists of G-Men following around a little old lady in a car for what feels like 15 minutes. Dull. As. Hell.
What really interested me was the undercover cop plotline that begins in the second act, because it really does feel like a gay romance. Cody Jarret (Cagney), a outlandish and violent man who's utterly in love with his mother finds a matronly replacement in Vic Pardow, and undercover cop sent to be his cellmate. Vic is the only character in the film that Cody is affectionate towards, besides his mother. That includes his wife, who's shown to be a backstabbing, manipulative harpy who Cody has no real use for.
As stated in the documentary, many of these films feature a bond between two males, and a flippant disregard for women beyond objects used to show off the lead's charisma, but this film seems to take it further with the relationship between Vic and Cody. Vic, despite being an undercover cop, seems to even return this affection at times. At first this is obviously because he's trying to get in with Cody who is suspicious at best and at other times utterly paranoid.
But at the end of the second act, an episode sparked by news of his mother's death has landed Cody in a straitjacket, ready to be transferred to an asylum. But Vic helps Cody escape anyway, for no real reason other than that Cody asked him to. Admittedly this is more of a plot hole than a character choice, but throughout the film, even after he has established himself as Cody's second-in-command, he continues to look out for him, which seems to come from a place of genuine admiration. Plus, the film's use of pop Freudian psychology elsewhere in the film (Cody has spells, a trait he gets from his father, who died in an asylum) does lend itself to this sort of interpretation. Cody even explicitly states in one scene that his relationship with Vic is a replacement for the relationship he had with his mother, which, I believe, is Freudian for "I want to bang you".
As I stated earlier, these films are always dated to an extent because they're films about nasty and violent men in a time where films weren't allowed to be nasty and dirty. Well, the gay relationship between Cody and Vic works the same way. It's not explicit, but nothing of that sort could be in those films, but I definitely think there's something to it.
