James Caan Was The Man We Always Wanted To Be — But Also The Man We Secretly Feared We Were

There he is in a saloon, wearing a buckskin shirt, taking off his dead adopted father’s battered black derby and holding it in his hands like a baby bird he’s found fallen from its nest. He struts up to a table of gunsels and psychopaths, cocky and dangerous. ‘You remember this hat?” he asks a guy who should probably remember the hat. The guy says “Well, why in the hell would I remember a hat?” When one of the guy’s buddies guffaws, an impossibly young, eternally-beautiful James Caan shoots him a quick look and things get real quiet. From a table over, the sheriff — John Wayne, of course — stands up and shoos off the women who were sitting with him. He knows, we all know, this kid is the real deal: a walking chip on an angry shoulder, and for all the tenderness with which he’s handling the hat, there’s something about the shine in his eye that tips the rage in his gut.

The picture’s Howard Hawks’ El Dorado, the second Hawks film featuring Caan right at the very beginning of his film career, and Hawks, who had an unerring eye for a certain quality of masculinity in tension and rest, had found an actor who not only could hold his own, but represented an evolution of what a leading man could be. In El Dorado, a picture headlined by Wayne and Robert Mitchum, it’s Caan who’s the tough guy. His angel-faced avenger Mississippi doesn’t even pack any iron: he brings knives to gunfights, and he wins. You don’t teach the look Caan gives to quiet a room — that kind of look comes from being the gorilla in the room, even rooms full of gorillas. And you can’t teach someone how to hold a hat like it was made out of shards of glass held together by the last memories of a man who meant everything to you. They are separate, some would say contrary, skills, and Caan was somehow both at once.

He was more Marlon Brando than John Wayne, more James Dean than Burt Reynolds, though what is arguably his best-remembered role as Sonny Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (and The Godfather II in flashback) might lead you to think otherwise. But the magic of Caan has always been more than his intimidating confidence, but the disarming self-doubt which leavened it. Not the iconic moment when he beats up his sister’s abusive husband with his fists, feet, a garbage can, and his shoe – but the moment right before that when he spins Connie (Talia Shire) around, sees her fresh shiner, and bites his knuckle in agony at her pain. His death is one of the most shocking deaths in a decade of shocking deaths at the movies for its suddenness and explicitness, certainly, but also for the surprise one must carry for having developed exactly this much empathy for a philandering, foul-mouthed, chaotically-evil murderer. There’s animal pleasure in watching Sonny destroy his brother-in-law, of course, but he’d just be another macho animal if we hadn’t witnessed his heart break because the man his sister loved hurt her like he did. Caan was a knot of contradictions we wanted to unravel because of his genuine, expansive charm. He was the problem you wanted to solve; and he was really good with kids. He’s said in interviews how his father never told him that he loved him, so he told his own son, Scott, he loved him all the time in the hopes that each generation of men in this family would be better than the previous one. His drive to be more than brutal, and failing more often than not, is at the heart of his mystique. And his tenderness towards the vulnerable made him precious to us.

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The young James Caan bore more than a passing resemblance to Gene Kelly, forged from the same Kelly/Burt Lancaster tradition of broad-shouldered, ridiculously-athletic boys, overpoweringly comfortable in their own skins and asked to play to their physical gifts. But Kelly could only ever play comic book gangsters, and Lancaster, even in From Here to Eternity, always felt unconvincing to me as a romantic lead. (I could buy him as sad, I could never quite buy him as vulnerable.)

Not so with, Caan. Hawks posed him in a racing jumpsuit, perched on the edge of a desk like a pinup model, in his star-making introduction as rakish driver Mike in the stock car race melodrama Red Line 7000 (1965). He was pointedly objectified by Shirley Knight in Coppola’s The Rain People (1969), ordered to take off his shirt so she can see what a football player’s body looks like. She’s duly impressed and says so.

He played another football player the very next year, Chicago Bears halfback Brian Piccolo in ABC Movie of the Week Brian’s Song (1970), opposite Billy Dee Williams as teammate Gale Sayers. Caan, who cut his teeth on television in a series of guest appearances on shows like Route 66, Combat, and The FBI, was reluctant to get back on the tube until, legend has it, he read the script, based on Sayers’ memoir, that leaned heavily on the interracial friendship between the two men. They were the first interracial roomates in the history of the NFL. Caan begins the film as the physical manifestation of charisma and easy masculinity, making his decline and eventual death from embryonal cell carcinoma among the most shocking, and emotionally affecting, moments in the short list of movies during which it’s long been culturally acceptable, even expected, to cry. Caan underplays his death in the film. Sayers tells him he’ll see him “tomorrow” and Piccolo says, quietly, “if you say so.”

He spends a lot of time in another bed in Rob Reiner’s Misery (1990) twenty years later, playing Stephen King avatar author Paul Sheldon, imprisoned and graphically-disabled, by a deranged superfan (Kathy Bates), and forced to turn his rage inward, finding himself as helpless and tortured as the younger version of himself tortured a helpless Olivia De Havilland in Lady in a Cage. I think something about seeing Caan, this ball of kinetic energy, prostrate and bound by disease or misadventure, only highlights the impossibility of ever snuffing out his light.

Caan was on the fast track to super-stardom in a decade designed for him, the ambiguous antihero, the subversion of the matinee idol in this physical specimen who, unlike his contemporary Burt Reynolds, desired projects outside of his slotted tracks of professional athlete, fast car-enthusiast, or brute. The same year Caan did Brian’s Song for ABC and a specific kind of immortality, he starred as John Updike’s eponymous Rabbit in Rabbit, Run (1970). Remembered, if it’s remembered at all, as a disaster of the first magnitude, the studio almost immediately pulled the film from distribution and declined until very recently to release it to any kind of home video. The problem is Rabbit, Run is… good. Caan is exceptional as a restless suburbanite, tied to a loveless marriage with a pregnant and alcoholic wife (Carrie Snodgress, also magnificent), he runs from her, runs from his eventual mistress, finds as we all do, running only leads to more of it. Caan is all pent up frustration, nostalgia-drunk and pathetic. He’s essentially the male version of the Shirley Knight character he played against in The Rain People.

The ’70s were full of tales of disillusionment and the existential pain caused by our collective, national loss of faith. Caan was drawn to characters like this in films like this: broken, lost, drowning in terrible messes of their own creation as the United States was, and continues to be, dying under the weight of its bad decisions. In Herbert Ross’s T.R. Baskin (1971), he plays a man who meets a young woman, T.R. (Candace Bergen) in a bar, strikes up a conversation, and then reveals all of his sadness in a frank, incredible and extended monologue. He talks about collecting baseball cards, studying the looks on the players’ faces as a penitent probes the secrets of stained glass windows, and then transferring his desire for deeper knowledge from pieces of cardboard to a wife he has idealized and too late realizes he doesn’t know. He confesses a suspicion he’s being cuckolded, laughs, and wonders what it is he’s talking about to this pretty girl he’s just met. Like Rabbit, Run, T.R. Baskin was savaged by critics and ignored by the public. Caan’s tastes were not popular tastes so much as principled ones, and then came The Godfather.

He was originally cast as Michael but once on set, he and Coppola realized he was Sonny and so he will always be in some way Sonny for my generation. I wonder if Gen Z will only see him as Elf’s dad and that’s fine, but as incomplete as Sonny in terms of full appreciation of his range. He followed The Godfather with the largely-forgotten light comedy Slither, a roadtrip crime caper where Caan’s small-town car thief Dick Kanipsia gets out of the pokey to find his old pal Harry dying of a gunshot wound. He plays the scene on his knees, diving for cover now and again to avoid hails of gunfire, listening to his buddy rambling on about hidden treasure and responding with a combination of bemusement and anxiety. “You want some water?” he asks Harry, and the way he does it is hilarious in its ironic mendacity. I love it too when, trying to evade his pursuers in a bingo hall, he does his best to be polite to the woman helpfully giving him advice on how best to play the game.You realize suddenly this guy who was asked to this point to mainly play off his physicality, is also scary smart. It’s that quality — tetchy but smart, cocksure but scared, a man afraid he’s an animal and the mask’s slipping — that he carries into Mark Rydell’s underseen melodrama Cinderella Liberty (1973) and Karel Reisz’s excruciatingly sad The Gambler (1974). He’s trying to be a better man, the best version of himself. In the one film, he’s a sailor on leave who visits a prostitute, falls in love with both her and her young son, and then finds himself in the position of needing to choose between one kind of honor and another. In The Gambler, his attempts at being better are less successful, addicted as he is, as most gambling addicts are, not to winning but to losing in increasingly humiliating ways. We know the promises he makes to his exhausted, heartsick mother are entirely empty, but Caan makes us believe that, if nothing else, he wants to believe what he’s saying.

He scored big in the buddy comedy Freebie and the Bean (1974), partnered up with Alan Arkin as a pair of violent, bantering detectives on the hunt for a local crime boss. It’s the prototype in many ways for Shane Black’s The Nice Guys: a sexy, sharp, slapstick exercise in cool. In it, there’s an indescribable scene where Caan and Arkin empty their guns into a public bathroom stall played as only Caan can play it. The way his body is tensed, his face drawn into a snarl, he doesn’t so much fire his guns as he throws the bullets out of the barrels by the tension of his anger. Watch, too, when he grabs a bag of peanuts out of the hands of a rival detective, out of nowhere, and throws it in his face with a “here’s your peanuts, buddy.”

There wasn’t a lot Caan couldn’t do. Action, comedy, he was an ace romantic lead for Barbra Streisand in Funny Lady (1975), picked over original lead Robert Blake by Streisand who based her decision on who she thought the audience would like to see her kiss: “Robert Blake? No. James Caan? Yes.” You pick up, the more you watch Caan on film, on how at least once a movie he would size up someone, just up and down with the kind of insouciant confidence, the absolute chutzpah, that again you can neither teach nor fake. It could be derisive, as of an opponent or irritant; it could be lascivious, it could indicate insecurity or it could be the only and the last warning the last dam was about to break. He is extraordinary as war vet Frank in Alan J. Pakula’s elegiac western Comes a Horseman (1978). Framed against a mountain range, a storm coming in, Frank tells his old flame Ella (Jane Fonda) how he hates the way she says his name and in the way he looks at her, the way his hand opens and closes on the heel of the saddle, there is the entire history of their relationship and portent of their possible future together. For the film’s inevitable showdown, as Ella watches the bad guys approach through a window, Frank joins her and puts a hand on her shoulder in a way that is somehow tender and desperate at the same time: confident and afraid, that was James Caan.

Caan could do anything, but he chose projects that were introspective playing characters who were often difficult to like. He had more great, definitive roles: another Frank in Michael Mann’s Thief (1981), a jewel thief who is pulled into an elaborate heist with a team of working criminals, proper villains all, which all goes pear-shaped when Frank’s split is waylaid by some very bad men who want Frank to do one, last, big score in exchange for a payday and a life with his girlfriend (Tuesday Weld). Caan carries the film. When waiting for a meeting with his fence, he notices some guy walking by him in an office and returns the look with an unscripted insolence. His conversation through a plastic screen at prison with old friend Okla (Willie Nelson) only lasts a couple of minutes in screentime, but lands with the weight of cathedral bells when Okla tells Frank he’s dying and begs him to help him get out of prison before that happens — and Frank says okay, but in the anxious tics and his barely-suppressed panic, we get Frank’s skepticism he can make it happen; his dismay he may be pulled into another criminal enterprise; his grief and shock upon learning his mentor has caught a surprise life’s sentence. At the end, there’s a long dialogue, pages worth, where Caan showcases how much menace he can pack into a few words; and how much the threat of violence following him like a cloud is tied to his fear.

He is incredible as Det. Sykes in Alien Nation, a deceptively complex performance in a deceptively complex (and socially incisive) picture that finds Caan in an irascible mode. In Honeymoon in Vegas (1992), he’s a high-stakes gambler who swindles a mark in exchange for a weekend with the mark’s fiance and then does his best to charm her into choosing him over the man who would gamble their future without first fixing the game. Comedy, crime, nobody was this funny and this terrifying at the same time; this sexy and this repulsive. He’s incredible again as the lost, murderous father in Steve Kloves’ Flesh and Bone (1993); as bag man Sarno in Chris McQuarrie’s The Way of the Gun, confessing how a lot of his choices are guided by a tragedy from his past: “I got… I got a daughter,” he says and that’s all and it’s enough. 

As Caan got older, the roles he played were increasingly curmudgeons; sometimes with a heart of gold (in things like Elf), and more often without one (as with his scary Mr. Henry in Bottle Rocket, pouring water on Owen Wilson and wearing a tooth necklace and sweatsuit as he plots his plots and spins the threat of violence off him like sparks from a sparkler). He’s great when he’s interrupted in the middle of something; his ability to project irritation is withering and imperial and when he appears on screen from nowhere, like a shark from the deep black sea, he could still immediately change the temperature of a movie. Look at his appearance in Lars Von Trier’s bleak Dogville when his “The Big Man” is revealed in the back of a car next to his daughter (Nicole Kidman) who has spent the film being raped and enslaved by the salt of the earth in a small Colorado town. He offers her all of the power of his station as a gang boss in a turn that is essentially the alternate version of The Godfather had Sonny lived and become an absolute monster in his father’s stead. He says if she wants vengeance, a good way to start might be to kill the town’s dog and nail it up there under the sign in the middle of their main street. He says it like he’s ordering a pastrami on rye at Katz’s: part rhetorical question, part wanting to make his little girl happy by giving her food she might like but is reluctant to try. He does more in his five minutes of that film than most actors can manage in a career. 

James Caan worked to the end of his life. There’s still at least one movie featuring him yet to be released. His body of work speaks to an artist cast into a popular mold who sought repeatedly and doggedly to break out of it. I thought today, upon learning of his death, not of all of these big turns but a little one he did out of love in a film called Mercy (2009) that his son, Scott Caan, wrote and starred in. He plays his son’s character’s estranged father, an English professor who answers his door in the middle of the night to see the boy, now the man, he hasn’t seen in a long time asking to come in. Look at the surprise in his eye, the dozens of different emotions he subsumes in an instant. Later, after a couple of drinks, he tells a story about when his son was little and tries to avoid asking any searching questions, but then he toasts to the “inevitable, the truth,” and his entire posture changes as he makes himself open to receive the pain of anything he might be about to hear. “Love doesn’t exist,” he says, but it did for Caan in all of these moments in his movies, collected together into a monument to the ethos of an entire era of brokenness, pretending to be smarter and tougher than you suspected you were or could be. He was simultaneously who we wanted to be and who we were afraid we were. We’re in a season of loss now, my generation, and day by day fewer giants walk this earth.  

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for pre-order. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.