"James Cagney returned to Warner Brothers after a five-year absence in a burst of fiery glory as Cody Jarrett, a tough, cocky gangster, hell-bent on murder and mayhem. In his 1931 incarnation as 'public enemy' Tom Powers, the gangster's immoral life of crime was depicted as a product of the Depression era. In 1949, to an America becoming aware of Freud, the gangster was, in the studio's words, 'a homicidal paranoic with a mother fixation.' Society was no longer held responsible for the existence of crime; instead, in a switch from a social to a psychological explanation, a misguided, well-intentioned mom was saddled with the blame. When director Raoul Walsh--who had earlier chronicled the rise (The Roaring Twenties) and fall (High Sierra) of the gangster--moved inside his mind, he didn't abandon the world of physical action. A fast-paced, violent classic of the American gangster genre, 'White Heat proved to be the apex of Walsh's career at Warner Brothers' (Kingsley Canham, The Hollywood Professionals)." Kathy Geritz