Like a panther or a heavyweight boxer, James Caan knew when to follow his instincts. There’s a famous moment early in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 mafia epic The Godfather – the film that earned Caan an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor and secured his immortality – where he’s acting purely on intuition. The script called for Caan, playing Don Vito Corleone’s hotheaded eldest son Sonny, to confront the FBI agents stationed outside his sister’s wedding. On his way back inside he grabbed a camera from an agent and smashed it violently on the ground. “I didn’t know I was gonna do it,” Caan told the AV Club earlier this year. “Nobody knew I was gonna do it, but I just did it. I was just impulsive.”
Part of what makes the scene so memorable is what Caan, who died on Wednesday (6 July) at the age of 82, did next. He wordlessly reached into his pocket and tossed a couple of bills on top of the wreckage, then turned and walked away. “Where I’m from… if you put the money on the ground, it’s OK,” Caan explained later. “You’re forgiven. You know what I mean? I paid for it, and forget it.” The gesture may have been unscripted, but it perfectly introduced both Sonny’s volatile temper and the mafia’s attitude towards the settling of debts. Once set in motion, the character found himself on an inexorable path to his bullet-riddled murder at a toll booth, one of the most famous deaths in cinema history. The scene was one of Caan’s many improvised contributions to The Godfather. He also dropped the musical phrase “bada-bing” into his frenetic description of an up-close assassination, something he’d heard real-life crime family capo Carmine Persico say while researching his role, so it’s Caan that The Sopranos have to thank for naming their strip club.
