5 Movies | November 1st
James Caan left behind a rich legacy of roles and characters etched into the fabric of American cinema. He had the physicality of an action hero—muscular, imposing, with broad shoulders and a dominating physical presence—and the acting talent to use that body as a precision tool: to intimidate, to dominate, to threaten and only when necessary to actually resort to physical violence. Yet he was equally effective in comic roles or playing modest, easy-going characters who avoid conflict. In a 1973 review, Vincent Canby praised him as "An intelligent, versatile actor with a low-key but unmistakable public personality."
He had a rollercoaster life, thanks to a short temper, a confrontational manner and a struggle with drugs in the late 1970s. But he was every inch an actor. While that volatility defined some of his best performances—think of Sonny, the hot-tempered eldest son in the Corleone family in The Godfather (1972), a performance that earned the actor his sole Academy Award nomination—he took each role on its own terms. Caan delved below the surface of his characters to bring up their contradictions, their conflicted emotions and the longings they keep suppressed. A couple of decades earlier and he could have been a film noir hero or the dangerous yet vulnerable bad boy in a romantic drama. A couple of decades later, he might have anchored an action movie franchise. But rising up through the sixties and becoming a star in the seventies, he was poised to work with some of the finest directors of his generation in roles that called up the depth of his craft and commitment to his performances.
Born in the Bronx in 1940, the son of German-Jewish butcher, and raised in Queens, where he acquired a way of speaking that inhabits all of his performances, the young Jimmy Caan hoped to be a professional football player and he remained athletically active throughout his life: he boxed, skied, studied martial arts and competed professionally on the rodeo circuit for nine years. He started acting while attending college at Hofstra, where he became friends with another student, future filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola. "I just fell in love with acting," he told Bernard Weintraub in a 2004 interview, and he studied under the famous acting coach Sanford Meisner at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre.
He made his Broadway debut in 1961, worked steadily on TV through the early 1960s and made his film debut playing a thug opposite Olivia de Havilland in Lady in a Cage (1964). Howard Hawks cast him in the racing drama Red Line 7000 (1965) and the western El Dorado (1966) with John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, and he played an astronaut in Countdown (1967), the first studio feature directed by Robert Altman. Then his old Hofstra college buddy Coppola cast him in The Rain People (1969), a character piece shot on the road with a minimal crew traveling across the country. Shirley Knight stars a young, neurotic housewife who flees her Long Island home and Caan costars as vulnerable, trusting college football star suffering from a brain injury that she picks up along the road. Coppola began with an idea and wrote the screenplay along the way, incorporating opportunities as they presented themselves, and he had the actors improvise scenes. In a 1969 interview with The Los Angeles Times, Caan admitted that he suffered a nervous breakdown from the stress of the production and the effort it took to inhabit the character. When the production ended, Caan began psychotherapy. While the film was a financial disappointment, the notices were generally good and Caan received the best reviews of his career. In a remembrance penned for The New York Times after Caan's death, film critic Manohla Dargis observed that Caan "imbues the part with a subtle, persuasive innocence that doesn't patronize the character or sanctify his disability."
The TV-movie Brian's Song (1971) followed, earning Caan an Emmy nomination for playing yet another football player, and The Godfather, which reunited Caan with Coppola, made him a bona fide star. He followed it up with Cinderella Liberty (1973), a low-key character piece about a career sailor on extended leave who falls for a hooker (Marsha Mason) who works the sailor bars. Director Mark Rydell shot the film on location in Seattle, Washington, incorporating the nightlife of the city's waterfront and downtown bar scene, which Caan's solitary character wanders until he develops a connection with Mason's rebellious son. Caan saw his character "like Billy Budd, all pure and good," and he invested him with a defining physical presence. "There are these little things you do," he explained years later. "If a guy’s been in the navy for twelve years, he walks a certain way." Though Caan regretted some of the projects he took after The Godfather, Cinderella Liberty remained among his favorite films.
Freebie and the Bean (1974) has been called the original buddy cop movie. The mix of gritty, high-octane stunt scenes with a brash, brazen sense of humor and a sardonic attitude was something audiences had never seen in 1974 and you can see the roots of Lethal Weapon (1987), Bad Boys (1995) and other buddy action films in its alchemy. The project, in fact, was initially conceived as a serious action film until director Richard Rush signed on to the film. "The thing that fascinated me about it was it's these two crooked cops riding around in a police car treating each other like an old married couple, constantly arguing," Rush explained, and he reworked it as a comedy. Rush had Alan Arkin in mind for one role and the studio gave Rush a choice between James Caan and Robert Redford for the other. “Caan seemed much more the character so I picked Caan, and it turned out he did a brilliant job with it." In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in the midst of shooting, Arkin praised his costar. "There is a very exciting interaction between us. Jimmy pushes me and forces me to change." Though reviews were mixed at the time, it was a huge hit and has been embraced by no less than Quentin Tarantino, who called it "nothing short of a masterpiece."
Slither (1973), a meandering shaggy dog story starring Caan as a car thief fresh out of prison, takes a more low-key approach to crime comedy. He just wants to get his life back on track but gets caught up in a kind of treasure hunt for a small fortune in embezzled money. Caan's ex-con plays straight man to an eccentric collection of characters who come together as they chase clues—and in turn are chased by an ominous pair of black RVs. It was the feature debut of Howard Zieff, an award-winning director of TV commercials, and the first screenplay from W.D. Richter, who went on to script the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Big Trouble in Little China (1986) and direct the cult movie The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984). Slither was well received by critics, who appreciated the offbeat humor and goofy characters. Roger Ebert described it as "the kind of movie that's constantly changing gears" and praised its "nice sense of timing" and Vincent Canby called it "a most entertaining, thoroughly anarchic morality play about an innocent who wakes up to find that his land has been taken over by greedy but mostly ineffectual body-snatchers." The studio, however, didn't know how to market the film and it floundered at the box office.
After battling the studios for better roles and directing his first and only film, Hide in Plain Sight (1980), Caan received his strongest role since The Godfather from Michael Mann, a successful TV writer making the leap to big screen filmmaker. In the cool, gritty crime thriller Thief (1981), Caan plays Frank, the head of a high-end crew of professional safecrackers. He prepared for the role by undergoing firearms training and learning the tools of the trade from John Santucci, a recently-paroled safecracker that Mann hired as both consultant and actor. In the film's major vault heist, Caan drilled through a real professional-grade safe on camera, wielding the industrial drill himself in real time. "It was one of my proudest moments," he recalled. The torches used for cutting through the vault doors were so hot that the actors had to use fire extinguishers to put out fires started by the intense heat.
Caan also spent time with career criminals and developed a deliberate way of speaking. "There is not one contraction in the film," he explained in interviews. "When you are in a hurry, you don’t want to have to repeat yourself. You want to make sure you are understood." Behind Frank's emotional armor, however, is a romantic yearning for home and family, a dream of a civilian life that he built up in his head while in prison. Tuesday Weld costars as the diner cashier he woos and in one scene, set in an anonymous coffee shot, he opens himself up to her. "It's the scene that made Frank come clear to me," explained Caan in 1998, and it convinced him to take the role. "This is probably the scene I'm most proud of in my entire career."
Looking back over the film decades later, Caan had nothing but praise for the film and the production. "Of all the movies I've done, I don't remember being as prepared, vis-à-vis the details of the movie, the backstory. It was just wonderful. The shooting was the easiest part because all the work was done up front. I believe, as much as an actor can be, I just came on the set and was Frank. This was truly a labor of love."
Soon after Thief, Caan quit acting for several years to refocus on himself and his family, and he coached his son's high school baseball, basketball and even soccer teams, before returning to the screen in Coppola's Gardens of Stone (1987) and giving one of his most celebrated performances in Misery (1990). He continued acting in everything from thrillers (Flesh and Bone, 1993) to comedies (Bottle Rocket, 1996 and Elf, 2003) to crime dramas (The Way of the Gun, 2000) and for four seasons played a casino manager in the TV series Las Vegas (2003-2007). And then there is his son Scott Caan, who developed into a successful actor in his own right, costarring in Steven Soderbergh's caper comedy Ocean's Eleven (2001) and its sequels and in the revival of Hawaii Five-0 (2010-2020) as Danny "Dan-O" Williams for its entire ten-season run. Father and son remained close over the decades, a testament to the time he took off to spend with his family. "Quite often I'm misunderstood when I say, 'It's not my life, it's my job,'" he explained in an interview. "People think that means I don't give a shit. Sure, I want to be the best actor in the world. But my life is my family, my son, my friends. I don't know how anyone can find fault with that."
James Caan passed away on July 6, 2022, at the age of 82. His work lives on.
