Huge actor who has just left us at the age of 82, James Caan left an indelible mark on cinema. Cited for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in “The Godfather” for his formidable composition, he even improvised a brief sequence.
A legend has just left us. James Caan passed away on Wednesday July 7 at the age of 82. If he has largely gone down in history thanks to powerful roles such as that of Jonathan in Rollerball, that of the writer put to death by Kathy Bates in Misery, or his brilliant composition with Michael Mann in Le Solitaire, his role as Sonny Corleone in the first installment of the Godfather saga propelled him into orbit. A performance rightly hailed by a citation for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor; the only one of his career, moreover, in a cruel injustice.
Wonderful and particularly irascible Sonny Corleone, supposed to succeed the tutelary figure of Don Corleone, from whom he did not inherit the wisdom and his thoughtful character. Quite the opposite of Michael, who will take over when Sonny falls riddled with bullets in an atrocious ambush.
In 2021, in an interview on the Turner Classic Movies (TMC) channel conducted by host Ben Mankiewicz, the actor spoke of his memories of filming the film. And to tell that the small sequence, at the beginning of the film during the wedding, during which he gets carried away to the point of breaking the camera of an FBI agent before throwing him some tickets, was totally improvised by him.
“I grabbed this camera and I broke it. And I remembered that in my neighborhood I had done the same, I also took out $20 which I threw in the street” told the one who also confessed, surprisingly, to have been inspired by a legendary comedian, Don Rickles (the future Billy Sherbert in Casino), for his composition work on Sonny Corleone.
Here is the sequence improvised by James Caan, which Francis Ford Coppola had the great wisdom to keep in the editing. So Long the artist…