The intense character study of criminal insanity in Raoul Walsh’s WHITE HEAT (1949) is most likely the greatest Cagney performance that has endured the test of time in Warner’s gangster genre. Cagney plays the psychotic and sadistic Arthur ‘Cody’ Jarrett, a ruthless gang leader with a penchant for deriving pleasure from inflicting pain on others and plagued by torturous headaches and a mother fixation (Margaret Wycherly) with Freud written all over it. Meanwhile Cody’s wife, Verna (Virginia Mayo) ‘bats her eyes’ at every man she meets while enduring the brutality and neglect of her unstable husband. The plot thickens when...