It feels like ages since we had a movie thread…….

Here on Öland, our 13 year-old son has his own crib. A little wooden cabin all to himself at the end of our “garden” where he can go and have some privacy. It’s right by the edge of the forest. He’s also found a ladder and at the weekend climbed up on the roof. As he stood up there, looking like a scrawny teenage Putin, shaking his fist at me and making it clear that trespassers would suffer a fate far worse than prosecution, I had a cinematic memory.

James Cagney as psychopathic gangster, Cody Jarrett, at the end of Raoul Walsh’s White Heat from 1949. Surrounded by the cops, he climbs to the top of a chemical container and shouting defiance at the world “Top of the world, Ma!” blows himself to smithereens. A real punk, long before these rockers came along. Not to mention a gangsta, old school style.

I haven’t seen that film for 40 years (it was part of the course on US cinema I did at Sussex University). But the scene and that quote was lurking in my memory, ready to resurface here at Camp » Continue Reading.