ames Cagney's gangster at one point in this film climbs on to his Mommy's lap, seeking comfort from one of the blinding headaches that are the chief symptom of his raging psychopathy. But that's the only "explanation" this wonderfully vicious movie offers for his relentlessly bad behavior. The rest is all snarl and gunfire. The film that can, perhaps, be read as an unannounced satire on the gangster genre, but it still leaves you breathless at the sheer anarchy of the crime wave he and his mob loose on an innocent world.—R.S.