James Fucking Caan

The career of James Caan will always be overshadowed by his signature role as Sonny Corleone in The Godfather. Of course, it’s not hard to understand why. Aside from being a massive success at the turnstiles and with critics, it’s often one of two answers you get when some publication rates the greatest films of all time. Number one or number two is almost always either Citizen Kane or The Godfather.

 As the hot-wired brother of Michael (Al Pacino) and Fredo (John Cazale), Caan provided the film with an energy that one could not duplicate without creating a second James Caan. The sequence where Sonny beats his brother-in-law half to death in the street after said relative by marriage lays his hands on Sonny’s sister (Talia Shire) must go down as one of the greatest extended beatdowns in the history of cinema. But it’s not the length or violence alone that makes the sequence so extraordinary—what lifts that moment to a higher plane is Caan’s remarkable access to rage and complete disregard for vanity. In that moment, he is completely terrifying and you would not be blamed for forgetting you are watching a movie.

For his role as Sonny, Caan received in the category of best supporting actor—and boy does this seem remarkable to say—the only Oscar nomination of his storied career. Then again, maybe that’s not so strange a thought. Caan was never quite what one would see as a leading man (although he played plenty of leads). He was often viewed as the thumb breaker tough guy whose path you didn’t want to cross.

While that description of Caan as an actor is not an inaccurate one—he exuded toughness and menace with a remarkable ease—it is reductive when one steps back and takes a fuller view of the many roles he played during his sixty years on screen.

Caan started out like many actors do: working on episodic television in the early sixties, doing one-shot performances on shows like Naked City, The Untouchables, and Dr. Kildare. The occasional film role would come calling, the most notable being Lady in a Cage in 1964, El Dorado in 1966, and The Rain People for Francis Ford Coppola in 1969.

Caan’s big break would come two years later with 1971’s landmark TV film, Brian’s Song. Based on the true life friendship of fellow Chicago Bears running backs Brian Piccolo (Caan) and the legendary Gayle Sayers (Billy Dee Williams), Brian’s Song was a classic weeper about the unlikely bond between Piccolo’s casually racist white man and Sayers’ superstar black athlete during the civil rights era. As Piccolo succumbs to cancer, in one of the all-time great deathbed scenes, Brian’s Song enters the pantheon of sports films that men speak of in hushed tones and openly weep at while viewing. 

Then, in 1972, came the role that would define Caan’s career when he reteamed with Coppola for the gangster masterpiece The Godfather. The one-two punch of Brian’s Song and The Godfather made Caan a star, but despite his newfound notoriety, he was not used to great advantage on screen as often as one might have expected. A number of forgettable projects followed The Godfather (Slither, Cinderella Liberty, and Gone With The West just to name a few). 

Still, when Caan locked into a project that was up to his gifts, he didn’t waste the moment. 1974’s The Gambler is a perfect example. Directed by the underrated Karel Reisz and written by a young James Toback, Caan excelled as Axel Freed, a literature professor by day, and a degenerate gambler by night. One might think that Caan would struggle as the former while being dead-on as the latter, but the truth is Caan is completely convincing at playing both halves of the character. If you want to see how this material can easily miss in every regard, take a look at Mark Wahlberg’s remake from 2014. 

The final scene of Caan’s The Gambler is truly astounding. After being seriously injured for coming up short on a debt, Caan goes to a basketball court in his loafers to join a pick-up game. Despite suffering from a rather deep flesh wound and wearing just about the worst shoes one could to play a game of hoops, Caan is not content to play for fun. He has to place a bet against his opponent—someone who is clearly superior to him at basketball. In that moment, we just see it in Caan’s eyes. No matter what it costs, he can’t stop. He won’t stop. Not until some loan shark puts him in the ground. It’s a staggering performance, and perhaps the greatest of Caan’s career.

Several years would pass before Caan sunk his teeth into a role as meaty as Axel Freed (although the Rollerball cult may be shouting in defiance right now), but when he got his chance, playing a safecracker named Frank in Michael Mann’s extraordinary film debut Thief, he all but ate the screen alive. On the surface, Thief is a “one last job” film about a criminal looking for a big payday followed by long walks on the beach. 

But while Thief is that, it adds up to so much more. In some ways Frank is a less elegant precursor to Robert DeNiro’s Neil McCauley in Mann’s greatest film, HEAT. Caan plays a true professional, but a life of staying one step ahead of the cops, creating front businesses to launder money, and never knowing if today is the day he’s going to get caught weighs too heavily on a man nearing middle age, but carrying the psychic weight of someone much older.

Frank longs for normalcy. A life with the lovely (although tough as nails) Jessie (a never better Tuesday Weld), a child, a nice house that he can put in his own name. To free himself of his criminal life he enters into a partnership with Leo (Robert Prosky), a fence whose jovial outward nature hides a deep-seated cruelty that will lead Frank to a point of no return. 

 I’ve probably seen Thief more than thirty times in my life, and time number thirty-one is probably right around the corner. Frank is the quintessential James Caan role. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to believe that Frank isn’t who James Caan was in real life. His brusque courtship of Jessie is ruggedly hysterical, and when Caan refers to a cop putting the screws to him as a “greasy muddafucka,” it’s absolutely impossible to think of anyone saying those words with more authority. 

After Thief, Caan struggled to find his footing. A third round with Coppola, the elegiac Vietnam film Gardens of Stone didn’t connect with audiences or critics (although I find it quite honorable), Alien Nation has its fans, but I’m not sure most people don’t remember the series spin-off better. A funny bit part in Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy may have been a trifle, but it was an enjoyable one. 

Thanks to Beatty’s notorious waffling (he and Jack Nicholson were the favored options for the role), Caan scored the last truly great lead of his career with Rob Reiner’s 1990 adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery. As an author being held captive by an angry fan for killing off the heroine of a popular series of novels, Caan went largely against type in Misery. Sure, Kathy Bates was the event and deserved her Oscar win, but Caan was the story, and he anchored the tale beautifully. 

Post-Misery, Caan settled into a succession of supporting roles. Some, like the terrific Flesh and Bone, the wicked noir The Way of the Gun, and the grim drama The Yards took advantage of his natural rough-hewn threatening presence, but a handful tapped into his seldom accessed facility for comedy. 

Taking advantage of Caan’s, well, Caanness, became a point of delight over the remainder of his career. Caan proved his comic chops in both Honeymoon in Vegas and Wes Anderson’s fine debut Bottle Rocket, but it was, of all things, a 2003 Christmas movie where Caan cemented his comedic legend: Elf.  

As Walter, a children’s book publisher who discovers he has an oversized Santa’s Helper for a long lost son, Caan is the solid floor that grounds Jon Favreau’s Elf and keeps it from being too saccharine. It’s hard enough to make a decent Christmas movie, but it’s even harder to make a new modern Yuletide classic. That’s what Favreau did, and in no small part because of James Caan. 

When Walter turns to his wife (a lovely Mary Steenburgen) and tells her he wants to put the incredibly annoying man-elf Buddy (Will Ferrell, who if he is good at anything, it’s being annoying) out, Steenburgen protests, saying they can’t just throw him out in the snow. 

To which Walter replies, “Why not? He loves the snow. He’s told me fifteen times.”

I can’t say or even think about that quote without breaking into a wide grin. The reason the line is so funny is because of what Caan doesn’t do. He doesn’t go for the laugh. He plays it straight. And the scene is all the funnier for it. 

Walter would be Caan’s last great part. He did have a lengthy run on the mediocre NBC series Las Vegas that ran from 2003-2007. The remainder of Caan’s years on film were made up mostly of movies that made you say, “James Caan is in this?” as you flipped the channel looking for something more compelling. 

It’s a funny thing. James Caan’s legend is probably bigger than you might think when you consider how few truly great films he was in. Yet still, that legend feels earned. 

No one was tougher on screen. No one was more formidable, even when being funny. 

He was James Fucking Caan after all. The universe only gave us one. 

James Caan died today. He was 82 years old.