JAMES CAAN ON THE TOLLBOOTH MURDER
JAMES CAAN, WITH every nod and gesture, exudes bristling intensity and macho swagger as the Corleone family’s eldest brother, Sonny. With his jutting chin and hair-trigger temper, he seems like the obvious heir apparent to his father Vito’s Mafia empire.
But Sonny’s murder changes the trajectory of the Corleone family forever. Having sped off in a rage to confront his sister Connie’s abusive husband, Sonny arrives at a tollbooth. There, it’s a frame-up, and rival gangsters with Tommy guns emerge from the car in front to pepper him with bullet fire. This sequence, shocking at first watch and unforgettable thereafter, is one of the most famous deaths in American movies.
Caan didn’t quite know what he was in for that day. “It wasn’t until we were on the set, with the tollbooth people, that I realised,” he remembers. “I had 147 squibs on my body and then along the side of the car, too. I’m a pretty instinctive person. When you feel those squibs ripping your suit up and ripping the Bondo [filler] out of cars, you pay attention to that. The only thing I could do beforehand was try to rehearse it like a dance.”
Apprehensively preparing to do the legendary death-jig of a man riddled with machine-gun fire, Caan says that preparation — in fact, choreography — was the only way to get it done right. “I was rehearsing where to put my arms and legs: step this way, and so on. Like I was dancing for [legendary dance choreographer] Martha Graham or something.” Still, a little bit of physical improvisation was okay: “I did that extra little jump when Sonny was on the ground and [a hitman] stands over him and shoots another round into him. I wanted to give it my all.”
In terms of the special effects, things were done the old-fashioned way in 1972. “There were these sacks of fake blood covered with gunpowder, in a dish sewn into something or put
onto your skin,” Caan explains. “And then when you pull the wire, the other ends were on a sort of scratch-board with nails. So the prop man would run along touching the nails on the board, and each time he made a connection, one would go off: bam-bam-bam-bam,” he says, imitating the percussive sound of bullet-fire. Did it hurt? “Well, if you put your hand in front of it, it would literally blow a little hole in your hand.”
A touch of danger has never been totally alien to James Caan, growing up in a working-class Bronx neighbourhood. “We didn’t have any bullets,” he says. “But we had sharpened buckles and cue-balls in socks. I was king of my block, because I was smart enough to realise if you were chief, you didn’t have to do too much of that stuff. So I made them believe I was the chief.”
Caan’s honest-to-goodness street-smarts shine through as he talks about his experience creating the brash criminality of Sonny Corleone. “Francis never talked to me about it, because I knew myself that I was [playing] this kind of ticking time-bomb,” he says. “But [comedian] Don Rickles was a friend of mine, and one day I was just at home shaving and was like: ‘That’s him. From now on, you’re from Pittsburgh and you’re busting everyone’s chops from morning to night.’”
With half a century of hindsight, Caan can get away with being flippant about being a pivotal part of one of the greatest American films ever made. His reaction to seeing his extravagantly violent on-screen death for the first time, he says, was: “Well, there go my residuals.” His dry sense of street humour makes it obvious why he was such a great Sonny to begin with.
“If there weren’t a bunch of girls on set that day, I probably wouldn’t have done it — it was scary,” he says. “But since there were girls there, I couldn’t mess with my future plans to go out that evening.” So the famous scene was only done in one take? “Hell, yeah. The prop guy was putting the squibs in and getting me ready for the shot, and I remember looking and seeing him connect all these things up. He says to me, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever put so many squibs on one person before.’” Caan recalls his wry, nervous reply: “‘Thanks, but I don’t think there is any need for that goddamn conversation!’”