Popil told him that was interested in prosecuting war criminal Grutas, still-at-large, who had sawed off the head of the rabbi at Kaunas, shot gypsy children in the woods, and walked free from Nuremberg when a witness had acid poured down her throat...There""s a lot of good mileage left on that animal" - and Steps jokingly (and disrespectfully, according to his mother) proposed naming it Punchy - and Rocky agreed.Was it a reactionary message piece against imperfect, "liberal" judicial trends that let ""sicko"" criminals get away, literally, with murder? Or was Siegel encouraging audiences to empathically identify with the indiscriminate vengeance of the violent, anarchic, unrestrained vigilante ""killer"" on the side of the law who acts as an autonomous police power?The screenplay, credited to husband-and-wife team Harry Julian Fink & R.(Walsh had also directed Cagney in two other films:Strawberry Blonde (1941)andA Lion Is In the Streets (1953).