James Caan died last week at 82. Everyone loved Caan the tough Jew, and so everyone wanted him to play Sonny, the hothead eldest son in The Godfather, for the rest of his life. Caan also wanted to play the tough guy. The son of refugees from Nazi Germany — his father was a kosher meat wholesaler in Sunnyside, Queens — he played up his bruising apprenticeship in the pool halls and played down his career as a college football player and acting student.
In Hollywood, he spent his nights at the Playboy mansion and his days wrestling with calves at the rodeo. Rob Reiner, who directed him in Misery, called him “the Jewish cowboy”.
The OED traces the first documented use of the wiseguy line “Bada-bing” to The Godfather, when Sonny Corleone advises Michael Corleone on how to shoot someone in the head: “You gotta get up close, like this, and bada-bing! You blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit.” Francis Ford Coppola initially cast Caan as Michael, the youngest son who is drawn back into the family business, then swapped in soft-faced Al Pacino and appointed Caan as the son and heir to a life of crime. Caan played the Italian American hood to the manner born. So much so, he said, that he was refused membership of a country club—not because he was Jewish, but because the board believed he was a mobster.
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James Caan arriving for "The Godfather" 50th Anniversary premiere screening event at Paramount Theatre in Hollywood, California, February 22, 2022 (Photo by Chris Delmas / AFP via Getty Images)
Caan played tightly wound macho men with unerring conviction, and he unwound like a whiplash. This took considerable intelligence and skill. But the kinetic charisma of Sonny Corleone obscures a truth that Caan brought out in this performance and many others. The tough guy is a loser.
Sonny is killed by his inability to control his anger. In Funny Lady (1975), the gambler Billy Rose loses Barbra Streisand’s Fanny Brice character. In Rollerball, also from 1975, Jonathan E is destroyed as much by his defiance of authority as by his game, a futuristic, death-on-wheels roller derby.
Caan excelled at portraying inner weakness. In 1981’s Thief (Michael Mann’s first feature), Caan’s ageing crook drags out each word: he cannot explain himself to himself. This incapacity found physical expression in Misery (1990), in which that most macho of American non-combatants, a writer, becomes the prisoner of a middle-aged fan (Kathy Bates). But Caan’s physical presence, especially in his Seventies heyday, overshadows his psychological smarts, just as The Godfather and its myths overshadow Thief and Caan’s many other excellent variations on the theme of male egotism and its blind spots.
In 1974, the same year as The Godfather Part II, Caan starred in Karel Reisz’s take on Dostoevsky’s study in existential failure, The Gambler. Caan plays Axel Freed, an English professor. He teaches Dostoevsky to students, takes prides in his strength on the basketball court, and slips into debt with a Mafia loan shark, played by Paul Sorvino (best known as the mobster Paulie Cicero in Scorcese’s Goodfellas).
We know what will happen as Axel writhes against the odds. Character is destiny, and the gambler, at heart, wants to lose. Axel Freed is one of those doomed Jewish hustlers, like the press agent Sidney Falco, played by Tony Curtis in The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) or, more recently, Howard Ratner, played by Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems (2019). The Gambler is a masterpiece, and almost forgotten now.
There is a cruel comedy to these smalltime tragedies. Caan, having missed most of the Eighties due to drugs and bad scripts, returned to public attention after Misery as a comedian, notably sending up Sonny Corleone in Mickey Blue Eyes (1999). He was funny, of course, but his best late-career performances are the ones where the frailty shows through. It was as though Sonny had grown older, but without becoming wiser, only weaker. Bada-bing.
