Never mind The Godfather: these are the James Caan classics you need to watch

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.