The loss of acting legend James Caan is hard for all the usual reasons, compelling movie-lovers to think of all the time we’ve spent with his films and feel as if we’ve lost someone not just known, but close to us. But it’s made all the more difficult by the fact that there’s no one in the younger generations that can even come close to filling his shoes. Born to a Jewish butcher who’d come over from Germany, raised on the lively and hardscrabble streets of Sunnyside, Queens, he was so thoroughly identified with blue-collar America that he practically earned an on-screen double citizenship as an honorary Italian. He made conceptions of masculine sexuality rise to meet him, owning his thinning, receding hairline, lush plumes of chest hair, and irresistible hangdog face. He shaped the cinema of the ‘70s and ‘80s while everyone else tried to mold themselves to it.
As is the tradition upon the departure of a true master, we’ve been going back over some of his finest performances and surveying the staggering sum of genius contained within. As a Sanford Meisner alumnus with a genuine love of cinema and its making, Caan cultivated an eclectic mix of genres, tones, and types in a varied filmography that would pair him with Robert Altman Howard Hawks, and Francis Ford Coppola before he turned thirty. He’d eventually land an Oscar nomination (wild guess as to what for). Still, he consistently found rewards inherent in the work as he expanded his repertoire and his range of abilities, from crooning to safecracking. Well-schooled yet real, intelligent, and in command of his versatile physicality, he’s as perfect an exemplar as any young actor starting out today can hope for.
Below, we’ve assembled a breakdown of Caan’s most significant performances, from beloved B-pictures to enshrined planks of the crime canon, from scene-stealing supporting turns to rafter-shaking leading roles. On-screen, he’ll live forever. – Charles Bramesco
“Brian’s Song” (1971)
A 1971 ABC Movie of the week, if you’ve come to see a great story, a great plot, a great TV movie with great writing, you have unfortunately come to the wrong place; it’s a frickin’ TV movie of the week, ya yutz, (which might be something Caan might say brusquely). But it is notable as Caan’s first Emmy nomination and how it helped break down racial lines on television. Based on the real-life relationship between Chicago Bears football teammates Brian Piccolo (Caan) and Gale Sayers (Billy Dee Williams), the movie centers on the bond established between the two athletes that only grows when Piccolo discovers that he is dying. At first, vying for the first same position on the team, they are adversaries, constantly busting each other’s balls, but when they’re forced to bunk together—a controversial move at the time—they become tight friends. It’s essentially a platonic love story between two men in the world of sports, which is pretty groundbreaking for the time. The buddy buddy-ness of the movie’s first half is corny, and the second half of the dying stuff is pretty treacly, but both Caan and Williams put in good performances that helped them get on the way to who they eventually became. – Rodrigo Perez
“The Godfather” (1972)
Sonny is the famiglia’s resident hothead. Scads of imitators shouting their way through the last fifty years of crime cinema tempt us to boil the eldest Corleone son down to his archetype. Still, just as there’s more to Fredo than his runt-of-the-litter ineffectuality and more to Michael than his cool calculation, Sonny possesses psychological depth running far past his temper. That he’s quick to anger provides him with a defining quality and later undoing, yet Caan finds all manner of subtler shades within his station as the snarling alpha male. Look closely at his eyes, flitting about during moments of key decision-making, and you may catch a flash of indecision common to those who know how heavy the crown sits. Caan tacitly lays out just how many different sources his rage can have; in the flashback sequence that sees Michael announcing he’s joined the military, for instance, Caan punctuates his furrowed brow and physical roughhousing with half-second expressions of despair. He wants us to see that Sonny’s anger comes from feelings of betrayal, that is to say, from being hurt by someone he cares about. Whether beating the teeth out of his sister’s abusive boyfriend or standing tall for the sake of his late father, his displays of impulsive violence always begin as garbled articulations of love. -CB
“Freebie and the Bean” (1974)
OK, the utterly insane and madcap “Freebie and the Bean” is perhaps not necessarily considered an acting tour-de-force. It’s essentially a B-movie, grindhouse-y, chaotic buddy cop, a black comedy action film starring James Caan and Alan Arkin. Still, it is a riotously good time and essential viewing for anyone interested in the career of James Caan. Before “Lethal Weapon,” you had “Freebie and the Bean,” and no one really remembers the plot, do they? It’s about San Francisco police detectives who are determined to bust a local crime boss at any cost, even if this means destroying the whole city in the process, and they do precisely that. ‘Freebie’ is notorious for its wild, insane stunts, and it’s a surprise dozens of people weren’t killed in the making of it all. Caan is typically the storm’s calm, letting Arkin play the manic part and quietly soaking up so many of its sly and sharp laughs. – RP