The Hollywood tough guy who smashed the mould
Empire contributor Christina Newland remembers the late, great JAMES CAAN
WHEN I INTERVIEWED James Caan late last year, over a long-distance phone call for Empire’s issue celebrating 50 years of The Godfather, it was apparent that the 82-year-old was experiencing poor health. Yet his condition didn’t prevent him from uttering one of his signature, slyly witty remarks. As we tried to speak over a bad phone line, he quipped, “There’s something between us, darling.” Talking to him, even with a bad connection, was a thrill; before the call ended, he quipped: “Put a full-page ad out for me, honey. I could use the work.”
In the movies, Caan always seemed too tough to die. With that New York baritone and delinquent walk, his square-jawed macho swagger, and his fit-to-burst volatility, who could ever get one over on this guy? Of course, The Godfather, the film that immortalised Caan, famously saw his character Sonny killed by rival gangsters. But Caan’s performance contains so much more than one legendary death scene. Beneath his firecracker rage there is a quiet, familial tenderness; look at the way he casually slings an arm around his kid brother’s shoulders, or, in a small flashback near the close of The Godfather Part II, launches out of his chair like he’s on springs.
Born in the Bronx to a Jewish butcher in 1940, Caan spent his youth scrapping with other boys on the neighbourhood streets and helping out on his father’s delivery truck. When he was 19, as he told it, his father learned while they were making deliveries one day that he was taking acting classes. Mr Caan was baffled, and his son was embarrassed.
But Caan worked his way up the Hollywood hierarchy. In 1969, his first film with Francis Ford
Coppola — The Rain People — would help put him on the path to The Godfather. Given his working-class background, Caan was always plain-spoken about his desire to earn good money for himself and his family rather than put on airs about the films he chose to make. He told Playboy back in 1976, “No, I’ve never saved any money. I don’t think that’s what it’s for. I like to live well and see my family and friends live well. That costs money. Fortunately, I make a lot of it.”
His combination of machismo and brooding introspection would carry him through a number of remarkable roles: an ex-convict safecracker in Michael Mann’s stylish Thief, a film with a tendril of doomed romance within that implies Caan’s serrated performance has something softer within. In Karel Reisz’s The Gambler, one of his finest roles, he plays a compulsive, self-punishing professor on a dark descent into gambling addiction. As Caan told me in our interview, “It was really one of my favourite character studies.” He is equally committed to his part as an arrogant writer in Misery who is abducted and emasculated,
an unusual foray into victimhood for the usually authoritative actor. And later on, he turned to comedy — albeit as Elf ’s perpetually annoyed dad. He was often cast as an athlete or cowboy in his younger days: in real life, he excelled at football, baseball and martial arts.
Always a roaringly entertaining interview subject, Caan excelled at anecdotes — from playing chess with John Wayne on the set of El Dorado and his associations with real-life mobsters to his addictions, the man loved a good yarn. On Twitter in recent years, he thrilled a younger generation of film fans by sharing behind-the-scenes photos. His amusingly grandpa-ish ‘end of tweet’ sign-off became shorthand for his online presence. You could see the natural storyteller as a perfect extension of his work as an actor. He wanted you to pay attention, but he didn’t have to tell you to. No-one who ever saw James Caan ever had to be told: you just watched, drawn in by his sheer force of personality. No full-page ad required.