(1949, b/w) On the California border, a gang of bandits pulls off a train robbery worth $300,000, leaving four dead. They hide away in the remote Nevada mountain home of the mother of their leader, Cody Jarrett (James Cagney). Cody's "a fierce psychopath" devoted to his ma (Margaret Wycherly), the kind of nasty offspring only a mother could love. When Cotton, listening to a radio, reports that a storm's on the way, Cody snarls: "If that battery is dead, it'll have company."

Before moving on to LA, Cody leaves behind Zuckie, badly burned, to freeze in the cabin (because Cotton only faked killing him). Staying in an auto court with Ma and his wife Verna (Virginia Mayo), Cody (in a scene reminiscent of Public Enemy, mashing a grapefruit into Mae Clarke's face) kicks the stool out from under Verna when she snidely answers where his mother's gone: "She just had to get some [strawberries] for her boy."

Taking the tip that "where Ma goes, Cody goes," Treasury Department agent Philip Evans (John Archer) and his T-men in three vehicles chase the wily Mrs Jarrett back to the motel. Evans gets a bullet in the arm while Cody and the two women escape by car into a drive-in theater. "Where do we go after the second feature?" asks Verna.

Director Raoul Walsh's suspenseful, explosive plot (suggested by Virginia Kellogg's story) is loaded with surprises and mid-20th-century technology (a spectrograph to connect a dead body with the railroad-tunnel job, an oscillator attached to a vehicle to triangulate its location).

To foil the cops and evade a trip to the gas chamber, Cody travels to Illinois to take the rap for a hotel holdup, for which he's sentenced to three years at most in the state penitentiary. Evans calls in undercover cop Hank Fallon (Edmund O'Brien) to play the role of a criminal, Victor Prado, who becomes one of Cody's cellmates.

Meanwhile, back in California, Big Ed Somers (Steve Cochran) moves in on Verna, expecting his connection Parker in the prison will do in Cody. In an effort to find out who has been laundering the loot for the Jarrett gang, Prado does everything he can to earn Cody's trust, including saving his life, making Cody think he's eager to join the gang when they get out.

As a child Cody faked headaches to lure his mother's attention; as an adult the headaches have become agonizingly real recurrences. Shortly after Ma (who always wanted her boy to get to the top of the world) pays her son a visit, telling him about Verna's betrayal and her intention to take out Big Ed, and just before Vic's breakout plan, Cody suddenly goes crazy.

Diagnosing Cody, kept in a straitjacket in solitary, to be violent and homicidal, the prison doctor recommends institutionalization for the insane. Cunning Cody has a few more tricks up his sleeve, making use of a modern variation on Greek Odysseus's ploy at Troy for his next caper. "I said I'd be back," he says to Verna.

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