James Caan Fully Embodied The Modern Crime Drama Like No Other

At the end of The Godfather Part II, after Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) has cemented his place in this world as the living embodiment of Satan following the killing of his brother Fredo (John Cazale) at Michael’s behest, co-writer and director Francis Ford Coppola closes with a flashback. The scene shows the Corleone brothers – Michael, Fredo, Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), and Sonny (James Caan) – gathered around the kitchen table. This scene occurs before the events covered in the original The Godfather; it’s not merely a deleted scene stapled to end of the sequel. The first person we see in this scene is Caan as Sonny Corleone, who walks into frame with Carlo (Giannai Russo), who he introduces to the family. Carlo, of course, will eventually be the agent of Sonny’s demise, cementing the tough, intimidating older Corleone brother – a bad man, a killer, make no mistake about this – as the tragic figure who pays the ultimate price for his life of crime.

This is a role that I believe James Caan – who passed away at the age of 82 on July 6 – was uniquely suited for. Caan was, to me, not unlike Robert Mitchum, or Lee Marvin. All three actors could, and did, make films outside of the crime genre. They made comedies, family pictures, sober dramas, war films, Westerns (Mitchum and Caan even appeared together in a Western, Howard Hawks’s El Dorado from 1966), but it was in the crime film that they found their true home. For Mitchum, the film noir era defined him as an actor, while Marvin came in a bit later, appearing in lean but hyper-stylized crime films like Point Blank. Both actors slotted perfectly into their eras, and by the time James Caan made The Godfather, he had entered an age of the American crime picture that he was clearly born for.

With The Godfather, the crime film became amoral, with protagonists who murdered remorselessly, but existed on screen as living, breathing human beings. Caan’s Sonny is, quite frankly, a real son of a bitch, a man who would kill anyone if he thought it would help the family business to flourish. Yet what dooms him is the horror and rage he feels when he sees how badly Carlo has beaten his wife, Sonny’s sister Connie (Talia Shire). When he sees the bruises on her face, Caan’s Sonny flinches and bites his fist, as if doing so will contain his violence long enough for him to be able to unleash it on someone who deserves it. It should not go unmentioned that when he finally does beat the tar out of Carlo (which leads Carlo to sell out Sonny, resulting in Sonny’s brutal murder), he, like an animal, bites Carlo’s knuckles.

The Godfather, which is currently available to stream on Paramount+, was released in 1972, and I think I hardly need to explain to anyone reading this the impact that film had on American film culture. Two years later, James Caan took a starring role in Karel Reisz’s The Gambler (it’s available to rent on Amazon). Very loosely based on a Dostoyevsky novella, with a script by James Toback (the day job of Axel Freed, Caan’s character, is as an English professor who at one time is shown teaching his students Dostoyevsky, which strikes me as a very Toback-ian invention), one thing that jumped out it me watching it now is the debt owed to it by the Safdie brothers’s Uncut Gems.

In both films, the central character finds himself, due to his compulsive gambling, in major debt with the kind of people you don’t even want to meet, let alone owe anything to. And in both films, the central character desperately tries to pull himself out of this debt, by, of course, gambling every penny he can beg off whoever is sucker enough to give him a hand-out. The tension mounts and mounts, the audience’s patience wearing thinner and thinner until it snaps. But while Uncut Gems achieves its stress-inducing tone through relentless, frantic pacing, The Gambler manages the same result in much more hushed tones. And Caan, of course, is the key. An extremely physical actor (his shoulders looked like there was a 2×4 laid across them), a man who seemed to emanate great physical power, is, in The Gambler scared most of the time, doing his best to tamp down on that fear but failing to hide it when he appears to be in true danger. There’s a scene late in the film when he’s confronted by Vic Tayback, playing the man who can either erase Axel’s debt or have him killed, and Caan, this epitome of macho physicality, is utterly cowed by him. And Caan doesn’t even do much to achieve this – it’s in his eyes. This is strong, powerful acting.

It would be seven years before Caan starred in the film that, perhaps even more than The Godfather, established him as one of the great figures in modern crime cinema. I’m speaking, of course, about Thief, Michael Mann’s feature debut (it’s streaming on Pluto TV). In it, Caan plays Frank, the titular thief, who through a series of setbacks related to his previous job, finds himself agreeing to do a job for a crime boss played by Robert Prosky. Prosky’s Leo is not to be trusted, and Frank knows it, but has little choice but to go through with the job. Along the way, Frank begins a relationship with Jessie (Tuesday Weld), and — surprisingly for Mann, who, as much as I love his films, can sometimes gild the lily when it comes to this sort of thing — the scenes focused on their romance are among the strongest in the film.

One of the most famous in the film is Frank and Jessie’s date at a diner, where Frank tells her about the four years he spent in prison. The vulnerability of The Gambler’s Axel and the toughness of The Godfather’s Sonny are on full display here, mixed together to show the fullness of who Frank is as he describes the horror of his life behind bars in such an off-hand way. But it’s not that Frank is immune to the effect these experiences had on him — it’s just that he’s come to terms with it all, and now he wants to have a normal life. Which is very hard for him, as we’ll see in a later scene when he and Jessie visit an adoption agency, and the worker they speak with raises an eyebrow when she learns of Frank’s criminal past. This enrages Frank, and he can’t keep it in, calling the orphanage to which the agency is connected “a dead place.” He knows this because he grew up in one just like it. It’s those memories, far more so than those of his prison life, that stir up his emotions. He wants a kid, he wants to save a kid, but everything in the world is standing in his way.

Despite my previous comparisons to Robert Mitchum and Lee Marvin, there really was no one else like James Caan. A career that long and eclectic, with so many indelible characters brought to life with such seeming ease, will be a hard one for anyone to match, not least because I can think of no living actor who could so fully embody the modern crime drama. We won’t see his like again.

Bill Ryan has also written for The Bulwark, RogerEbert.com, and Oscilloscope Laboratories Musings blog. You can read his deep archive of film and literary criticism at his blog The Kind of Face You Hate, and you can find him on Twitter: @faceyouhate