We're going to sail through the night sky like a pair of bottle rockets

I wish the Brattle Theatre did not feel the need to deafen its clientele. It's a small theater; it doesn't screen big dumb action movies; it doesn't need to go all the way up to eleven. I had tissues stuffed into both my ears and they still ache sharply. Maybe everyone else in the audience is losing their hearing, but I don't need to be made to fit the profile. Otherwise, Mrs. Lincoln . . . Actually, I loved White Heat. Right now I'm having trouble thinking of another actor who uses himself as physically as Cagney—he hurls himself into the role literally and it's like watching lit magnesium, it's mesmerizing. He was a dancer. He could sculpt matter out of motion. But the result is not at all stylized, and neither is the film; one of the aspects that struck me most was its modernity, carphones, fast food, electronic tracking, the increasing difficulty of vanishing off the grid even in 1949. The edges of the map are closing in. Cody Jarrett goes up in a sheet of flame: he looks like apocalyptic science fiction, the end of the gangster era in a mushroom cloud. I don't know what the hell the movie should be classified as, but I'm very glad I saw it. I think my ears are still out on their verdict, though.