He was an actor at the crossroads of old and new Hollywood, he was a method actor and an action hero, and of course he was part of the golden cast of The Godfather. James Caan as Sonny Corleone is the only explosive figure in the circle of sanguine Italian-Americans, and his father has to admonish the insubordinate hothead who has already given himself away and thus triggered the gang war. He also can’t control himself when he wants to defend his sister’s honor and in unbridled anger beats up her husband who is beating her.
James Caan. was born in the Bronx in 1940, studied at the University of Michigan and was a gifted football player, rodeo rider and karate fighter. As early as 1963 he had a small role in Billy Wilder’s comedy “Irma La Douce”, the following year he played a violent criminal in “Lady In A Cage”. Howard Hawks hired him as a knife thrower alongside John Wayne and Robert Mitchum in El Dorado (1966), the second film in his four men defending a town trilogy. He was then spotted by Francis Ford Coppola for The Rain People (1969), where he was in his element as a football player. Coppola loved this physical actor and fought the producers for Caan when casting the Godfather.
After the film’s triumph and an Oscar nomination, James Caan played rascals and boisterous in The Gambler and Freebie And The Bean, then got cast right in Sam Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite, wrong in Funny Lady, and perfect in “Rollerball” (all 1975). His cigar-smoking American jeep sergeant in Richard Attenborough’s war spectacle A Bridge Too Far (1977) is the hallodri alongside noble war heroes like Anthony Hopkins, Sean Connery and Maximilian Schell – but the bridge is stormed by Robert Redford, of course. Caan’s finest role is perhaps the cowboy opposite Jane Fonda in Alan J. Pakula’s quiet love story Comes A Horseman (1978). In the early Michael Mann film Thief (1981), which some critics consider Mann’s best, Caan is a wonderful loner.
James Caan in Thief:
He retired for a few years after his sister’s death in 1982, burned out and smitten with cocaine. It was not until 1987 that he played again – in “The Stone Garden”, one of Francis Coppola’s hapless late works. In Misery (1990) he lies in bed with his leg in a cast and has to let Kathy Bates act – the fact that the virile man is so tied up makes the film even more gruesome. With Honeymoon In Vegas (1993), a twist on the famous early ’50s Born Yesterday, Caan embarked on a late career as a burly comedian opposite Nicolas Cage and Sarah Jessica Parker. In “Mickey Blue Eyes” (1999) with Hugh Grant, he happily satirizes his mafia character.
James Caan in Misery:
Lars von Trier got him in 2003 for his experimental film “Dogville” – James Caan entered his third phase as an acting legend. He left the series “Las Vegas” when he got bored; Tom Selleck took over for the last few seasons. Until last year, Caan acted in smaller films. He was married four times; his son Scott writes screenplays.
James Caan, the last man to star in El Dorado, died on July 6 in Los Angeles at the age of 82.
<!–
–>
<!–
–>