“Raoul Walsh’s idea of a tender love scene,” Warner Bros. honcho Jack Warner once bragged, “is to burn down a whorehouse.” With his eye patch and confident, genial swagger, Walsh was the archetypal macho mid-century Hollywood director. Like his contemporary William Wellman, Walsh’s two-fisted man of action persona disguised a restless genius for experimentation within the confines of assembly-line filmmaking. He had a gift for lacing his pictures with dynamic and unshakable visual poetry, which spawned some of the most instantly recognizable moments in American film.

But hearing James Cagney howling, “Top of the world, Ma!” from a television set in the background of a “Sopranos” episode is no substitute for seeing “White Heat” – a reinvention of the gangster film as clever and drastic in its day as “The Sopranos” is today – on the big screen.

Walsh made more than 100 films over more than 40 years, including a particularly rich 13-year run at Warner Bros. There he worked the studio system shrewdly, turning out terrific crime pictures, war movies, Westerns, and comedies that, in less able hands, would have been forgotten instantly. Starting July 9, Astoria’s Museum of the Moving Image will present “White Heat” (August 20) and 22 other films by this great 20th-century American artist.

Walsh crafted melodramas, comedies, and shoot-em-ups with the clarity of a showman committed to “hypnotizing,” in Walsh’s words, even the most jaded or hostile audience. Walsh’s frames are subtle compositional wonders, which define his characters and propel his stories as much as dialogue does. When asked what made his pictures unmistakably his, Walsh told an interviewer, “I think it’s their tempo; breaking it up and hustling it along.” Moving Image’s seven weekend retrospective kicks off tomorrow with four films that gallop at Walsh’s distinctive pace.

“The Man I Love” (July 9), the lean prototype for Martin Scorsese’s elephantine “New York, New York,” successfully fuses film noir anxiety with musical sass. “The Bowery” (July 9) pulls off the astonishing pre-Code feat of mocking more ethnic groups in its first 10 minutes than most films would dare to in two hours. As in the brilliant “For Me and My Gal” (July 10) and “The Strawberry Blonde” (July 24), in “The Bowery” Walsh balances a gleeful fascination with the thornier sides of human nature with aw-shucks sentimentality and biting wit.

Though weighed down by a long running time and stock characters, 1930’s “The Big Trail” (July 10) features gorgeous black-and-white, 70-millimeter location photography that looks for ward to future blockbusters while harking back to the pictorial transcendence of late silent film. “The Big Trail” was a critical and box-office disaster, but for Walsh its nosedive was a blessing in disguise. In the wake of the failure of “Trail,” Warner Bros. hired Walsh to make the expertly controlled pictures of the burning-whorehouse variety that earned Jack Warner’s backhanded praise and are worth at least seven weekends of anyone’s attention.

Until August 21 (3601 35th Avenue, at 36 Street, Astoria, 718-784-4520).