Cody Jarrett

Nearly 20 years after he played gangster Tom Powers in The Public Enemy, cinematic tough guy par excellence (not to mention forceful song-and-dance man) James Cagney portrayed psychotic Cody Jarrett in White Heat. Cagney's robber-murderer Cody, as TIME wrote when the movie came out in 1949, "empties his pistol into his victim with the calm, preoccupied expression of a pedestrian waiting for a street light to change." Of course, he's not always so serene. This gang leader also suffers from killer headaches and an unhealthy attachment to his ma.

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