James Caan in The Bettor.
Photo: Paramount/Kobal/Shutterstock
Adam Sandler likes to tell a story about being on the Paramount lot as a young guy, around the time of the making of Misery, and running into James Caan. A huge fan, the comic fidgeted about fulfilling his hero, informing the Oscar-nominated legend that his grandmother believes that Sandler will be the next Caan. “Oh, you don’t wish to do that,” Caan allegedly stated in response. The ramification was that Caan didn’t always believe his profession was something to aspire to, and to be fair, he was having a hard time at the point where he signed up for that Stephen King adaptation. The good news is, Suffering would turn things around for Caan, who passed away on Wednesday at the age of 82, with his co-stars and friends fondly remembering the iconic character actor.
Anybody wanting to comprehend Caan’s appeal need to start with Caan’s apparent emphasize, 1972’s The Godfather, in which he plays Sonny, the volcanic eldest son in the Corleone household, whose graphic death is among the most well-known and harrowing in all of movie theater. Caan played Sonny as a live wire, the explosive counterpart to more youthful sibling Michael’s (Al Pacino) calm, measured behavior. But after that Best Image winner, where do you go next? We present, in sequential order, nine other important James Caan performances, which stretch from the late 1960s to early this century, from touching dramas to ridiculous funnies. The Godfather deserves its place at the top of his obituary, however these extra films suggest the breadth and depth of an impressive actor.
The movie Francis Ford Coppola made after the success of Finian’s Rainbow– the one he cashed in his studio success for (and which tumbled so completely that he ‘d need to work his method back into the market’s good enhances with The Godfather)– is among Coppola’s many personal. A pregnant female (Shirley Knight) based upon Coppola’s mom flees from her family and takes a trip across the nation with a mournful police officer (Robert Duvall) and a brain-damaged previous college football star (Caan) called Killer; the trio fights and likes and tries to find some significance in their lives. There are moments when the film soars, and even though it breaks down at the end, it’s a terrific showcase for all three stars, specifically Caan, who was still finding his way around Hollywood after a failed Howard Hawks movie called Red Line 7000. There’s an innocence to Caan here, sprinkled precariously with violence. Coppola, suffice it to say, was refrained from doing with him or Duvall.
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=” clay-paragraph” data-editable=” text” data-uri=” www.vulture.com/_components/clay-paragraph/instances/[email protected]” data-word-count=” 123″ > By all accounts one of Caan’s preferred movies although he ‘d at first turned down the part of Brian Piccolo, a real-life football gamer with terminal cancer, because he wished to operate in films, not television. (This was an ABC Film of the Week.) But the power of Piccolo’s friendship with Hall of Famer Windstorm Sayers (played by Billy Dee Williams), together with the weepie script, won him over, and Brian’s Tune was such a hit it was the highest-rated-ever TV film at the time. (His one Emmy nomination was for this film.) It is practically guaranteed that an older male member of your family has actually wept watching Brian’s Song; the one-two punch of this and The Godfather made Caan a substantial, big star.
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Underrated and ignored, this mournful take on a literature teacher with a gaming problem probes the psychology of obsession, and Caan plays this guy as intelligent but also doomed. What’s heartbreaking about Axel is that he’s smart enough to know better, however what The Bettor illustrates so convincingly is that “understanding much better” indicates nothing to an addict, and Caan captures both the character’s confidence and despair, the roller rollercoaster of emotions that feed him, even if self-destruction is the only possible outcome. A cutting buddy piece to another 1974 movie about hopeless gamblers, Robert Altman’s California Split, The Gambler feeds upon its star’s Everyman urgency, his rejection to play anything less than entirely authentic.
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In retrospect, it’s an embarassment that Caan never ever once again worked with Michael Mann, two consummate no-bullshit artists who lined up on this taut tale of a jewel burglar who’s doing the proverbial One Last Job before leaving the life behind. “He’s a workaholic, firstly,” Caan stated previously this year about working with Mann on his function directorial launching. “He’s tough. However I … prefer them to someone who does not like what they’re doing or doesn’t think in what they’re doing. Michael believed he had an idea, and he stayed with it.” So did Caan, who saw in Frank an aging idealist a bit more openhearted than the tough-guy characters he normally played. Mann brought out an accuracy in Caan, who got a rare chance with Thief to take pleasure in a star vehicle, one that accommodated his steely strengths. We’re left to wonder what Caan might have brought to Heat or The Insider, although perhaps we should be just grateful that these two linked at all.
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=” clay-paragraph” data-editable=” text” data-uri=” www.vulture.com/_components/clay-paragraph/instances/[email protected]” data-word-count=” 131″ > The key to Caan’s efficiency as Paul Sheldon, the author abducted and tortured by Kathy Bates’s Annie Wilkes, is that he is passive: Everything occurs to him, instead of because of him. To have a muscular, brash actor like Caan play the part makes both the film and Bates’s (Oscar-winning) efficiency more effective: You feel that far more for him due to the fact that he discovers himself so defenseless. This part was denied by just about every major male star in Hollywood– Harrison Ford, Gene Hackman, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman– however Caan is best in it: He is affordable, and sane and trusting, in a way Caan’s characters weren’t constantly. You think every bit of it here. Who understood Caan was such an excellent pleader? (Not that it assists him.)
Caan remained in Texas for only two weeks to film Wes Anderson’s very first film, and Anderson would later wonder if Caan completely understood what he was doing there with all those amateurs.(” I remember him being just, ‘Why is this happening?'” Anderson would later say.) However Caan, the only actor anyone who saw Bottle Rocket knew at that point, was plainly having a blast, calling the script “poetry” and playing his “gang” leader with a twinkle in his eye. This is so different from the films Anderson would later make– it’s difficult to envision Caan working as well in any of them– which is another reason why Caan’s shabby beauty and tender menace is such a tight fit here.
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=” clay-paragraph” data-editable=” text” data-uri=” www.vulture.com/_components/clay-paragraph/instances/[email protected]” data-word-count=” 143″ > In this James Gray drama, James Caan starred together with Mark Wahlberg, who would remake among Caan’s own movies, The Bettor, more than a decade later on. Here, he plays Frank, who wishes to assist his ex-con nephew Leo (Wahlberg) discover work. But Leo must be careful whom he accepts “help” from, setting the stage for a story about family, power, and corruption. The Yards quite return the New Hollywood Renaissance of the 1970s, so it makes sense that Gray would cast one of that decade’s preeminent character stars to portray Frank, a misaligned male trying to keep his little empire afloat. The function comes as naturally to Caan as breathing, and he fills this person with a life time of regret and desperation. It was an excellent tip of the soulfulness he could find in even the most unethical of people.
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Lars von Trier’s dangerous diatribe on the hypocrisy of small-town American “values,” Dogville constructs to its final revelation, which is that Nicole Kidman’s innocent victim Grace is, in fact, the child of a powerful mobster, determined in the credits only as “the Huge Guy.” When the character shows up, Caan plays him with a mix of hazard and adult difficult love– not that he entirely took pleasure in the experience of making the film. “Oh, he’s a fucking wacko!” Caan would later state of von Trier, recalling that his big scene in the vehicle with Kidman needed him “being in the back of this thing for hours. Smoking a cigarette in this silly attire. Nicole lastly is available in with von Trier, we play this long scene, and then they get out and go back up the street. I’m sitting there waiting. I’m in there for literally 3 or 4 hours more, and Nicole is exhausted. After a while I say to the [assistant director], ‘Go inform Nicole that if she requires me, I’m still in the damn automobile.'” Nonetheless, Caan makes his presence felt, imbuing that star-studded movie with one final veteran heavyweight who challenges Grace, in addition to our perception of a character that we believed we understood. Of all the gangsters Caan would play after The Godfather, this one is the very best.
Sure, The Godfather is what he’ll be kept in mind for. But an entire generation of kids first saw Caan as Walter, Buddy’s father in this traditional Christmas funny. Caan never ever winks or imitates he remains in a funny; he’s confused and even a little afraid of Pal and (fairly) wants nothing to do with him, but once he understands the fact that he’s his child, he takes him in anyway … and finds out to enjoy him, much like the rest people. If you can melt Caan’s heart, you can melt any person’s. Caan is the character who changes in Fairy: In such a way, it’s truly his story. Not that Caan ever oversteps: He plays the function straight, warmly, and with the excellent cheer Buddy, and the film, deserves.
Grierson & Leitch discuss the motion pictures regularly and host a podcast on film. Follow them on Twitter or visit their site.
Source: https://www.vulture.com/article/best-james-caan-movies-besides-godfather.html