{"id":1545867,"date":"2022-07-09T09:04:45","date_gmt":"2022-07-09T13:04:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1545867"},"modified":"2022-07-09T09:04:49","modified_gmt":"2022-07-09T13:04:49","slug":"remembering-james-caan-he-played-hotheads-roughnecks-while-exposing-their-humanity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/remembering-james-caan-he-played-hotheads-roughnecks-while-exposing-their-humanity\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering James Caan: He Played Hotheads &#038; Roughnecks While Exposing Their Humanity"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"float:left\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">24<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fremembering-james-caan-he-played-hotheads-roughnecks-while-exposing-their-humanity%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1545867&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><\/div>\n<p>It in no way shortchanges the brilliance of <a href=\"https:\/\/variety.com\/t\/james-caan\/\" id=\"auto-tag_james-caan\" data-tag=\"james-caan\">James Caan<\/a>, who <a href=\"https:\/\/variety.com\/2022\/film\/news\/james-caan-dead-godfather-misery-1235311096\/\">died Wednesday<\/a> at 82, to point out that he had a special gift for playing insensitive men. He was a gruff, tough, raging, <em>muscular<\/em> actor, with a ramrod physicality and an imposing look: the wiry curls of brownish-blond hair, the handsome planed face that seemed carved out of granite, the mouth set in a scowl that was a challenge and often a threat. (You got the feeling that even his brain knew how to bench-press.) In \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/variety.com\/t\/the-godfather\/\" id=\"auto-tag_the-godfather\" data-tag=\"the-godfather\">The Godfather<\/a>,\u201d the movie that not only established him as a great actor but marked him as a mythological presence, Caan played Santino \u201cSonny\u201d Corleone, the lone hothead in a family of very cool criminals. Don Vito was a courtly, soft-spoken manipulator, Michael a moody intellectual, Fredo a black-sheep nebbish, and Tom Hagen the adoptive sibling as passive bureaucrat.<\/p>\n<p>But Sonny? He glared and shouted and busted balls. He blurted out what he thought, he slept with whomever he wanted, and when a rival sought to make an example of him, it wasn\u2019t hard to light Sonny\u2019s fuse. Sonny had already stomped the crap out of his own brother-in-law \u2014 smashing him, in one of the most electrifyingly realistic fight scenes in movie history, with a garbage can. He was teaching the guy a lesson for having become the violent domestic abuser of Sonny\u2019s sister. And when it happened again, the raging, thick-headed Sonny never dreamed that he was being set up.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a true fact of Hollywood lore that Caan, in \u201cThe Godfather,\u201d was originally cast to play Michael Corleone. (The Paramount executives liked him for the part; they thought Al Pacino was too short.) Yet it\u2019s part of the film\u2019s timeless power that of all the Hollywood casting yarns you\u2019ve ever heard, that one may be the most impossible to imagine. James Caan as Michael? It would be like asking a German Shepherd to impersonate a Labrador. Caan <em>became<\/em> Sonny, investing him with a magnetic and, at times, tormented volatility that seemed to boil up over the sides of the character. It\u2019s a performance so indelible that you may watch it and think the actor is simply pouring his own self into the role.<\/p>\n<p>Yet that wasn\u2019t the case. If you want to know what a potent act of imagination Caan\u2019s performance in \u201cThe Godfather\u201d was, just watch him in the drama he made the year before, the one that established him as a presence for the 30 million viewers who saw it. That would be \u201cBrian\u2019s Song,\u201d the 1971 ABC Movie of the Week in which he played Brian Piccolo, the Chicago Bears running back who was struck with terminal cancer, and Billy Dee Williams played his friend and teammate Gale Sayers. This was a story of Black-and-white bonding as moving \u2014 and, I would argue, as culturally significant \u2014 as \u201cIn the Heat of the Night.\u201d And Caan made Brian Piccolo the soul of a kind of shaggy heartrending American openness, a man driven, almost by instinct, to overcome the prejudice around him.<\/p>\n<p>What James Caan possessed that emerged from own temperament was a gleeful and irrepressible machismo. He could turn almost any scene into a power play, and did. You see that in \u201cThe Gambler,\u201d the Karel Reisz\/James Toback New Hollywood-meets-Dostoyevsky drama he made two years after \u201cThe Godfather,\u201d where he played the title character \u2014 a college instructor turned compulsive gambler \u2014 as a man so driven to live on the edge that it was as if he was competing with himself, courting danger as a test of mettle. It\u2019s one of Caan\u2019s most gripping performances.<\/p>\n<p>Even so, he spent the \u201970s searching for how to anchor his identity as an actor. He went the downbeat romantic route in \u201cCinderella Liberty\u201d (1973), as a melancholy sailor opposite Marsha Mason\u2019s single mother and sex worker, and opposite Barbra Streisand in the misbegotten sequel to \u201cFunny Girl.\u201d But he kept getting drawn back to the role of tough guy: as the bullheaded buddy cop in \u201cFreebie and the Bean,\u201d the betrayed assassin of Sam Peckinpah\u2019s \u201cThe Killer Elite,\u201d the dystopian gladiator of \u201cRollerball,\u201d and the divorced father turned vigilante detective in \u201cHide in Plain Sight.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Most of these, at heart, were overpriced B-movies. But they culminated in Caan\u2019s performance as the wizardly safecracker trying to go straight in \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/variety.com\/t\/thief\/\" id=\"auto-tag_thief\" data-tag=\"thief\">Thief<\/a>\u201d (1981), Michael Mann\u2019s searing debut feature. It\u2019s an exquisitely stylish and tautly executed modern-day noir, and what gives the film its soul is Caan\u2019s performance as a criminal who is desperate to find some sort of redemption, despite the fact that prison taught him to live in a place \u201cwhere nuthin\u2019 means nuthin\u2019.\u201d In \u201cThief,\u201d Caan projects not just an expression of macho values but, in a certain way, the ultimate critique of them. Apart from \u201cThe Godfather,\u201d it may be his finest performance.<\/p>\n<p>Caan enjoyed a rare moment of blockbuster levity in \u201cMisery,\u201d the gothic-comedy adaptation of Stephen King\u2019s novel, in which he played a romance novelist who is captured by Kathy Bates\u2019s deranged fan. It was a riff on celebrity culture in which Bates, with her polite homicidal hostility, had the showpiece role, but it\u2019s Caan, with his sly and quiet reactions, who roots the scenario and makes it work as drama. After that, he played a lot of aging criminals, in movies from \u201cBottle Rocket\u201d to \u201cThe Yards\u201d to \u201cDogville.\u201d Even in a goofball lark like \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/variety.com\/t\/elf\/\" id=\"auto-tag_elf\" data-tag=\"elf\">Elf<\/a>,\u201d which is the movie for which an entire generation probably knows him best, he was a hard case \u2014 the tough-nut dad of Will Ferrell\u2019s North Pole misfit, though by now he was the elder statesman of hard cases, carrying his savage credibility around with him almost as if he\u2019d been an actual underworld character.<\/p>\n<p>For that\u2019s how legendary his performance in \u201cThe Godfather\u201d had become. It helped to form our very image of who a gangster was \u2014 and, in fact, of all the major players in \u201cThe Godfather,\u201d the one who comes closest to resembling a real-life gangster is Caan\u2019s Sonny. Yet what we cherish about the character isn\u2019t just how tough he was. It\u2019s how large he loomed. Francis Ford Coppola has said the reason the scene where Sonny gets massacred at a tollbooth goes on for so long is that it felt like that was the level of ballistic overkill needed to wipe out the character. And even then, he lingered. You couldn\u2019t imagine that someone with this much fire and force was gone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It in no way shortchanges the brilliance of James Caan, who died Wednesday at 82, to point out that he had a special gift for playing insensitive men. He was<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1547299,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1545867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1545867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1545867"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1545867\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1547299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1545867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1545867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1545867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}