Cagney's character was so despicable...

but still for some reason you can't help but root for him somehow. When he does the train heist, he ruthlessly kills those poor engineers just because they can identify him, but as the film went on, I found myself hoping he would outsmart the undercover agent. I wonder why that is that in movies you can sometimes end up hoping the bad guy gets away, even when in real life you'd have zero sympathy. Very good film... interesting to see the early use of triangulation to track criminals. Didn't think they could do that in 1949