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    Best James Caan Movies to Stream

    Drama, comedy, suspense, action, kids’ movies — there was truly nothing he couldn’t do. Who else could star in both “The Godfather” and “Elf”?When James Caan’s family announced his death on Thursday, it sent shock waves through cinematic circles — not because his passing was particularly premature (he was 82), but because he seemed such a vibrant and outsize personality, you figured he just might live forever.He hadn’t retired, or even slowed down much, in old age. He co-starred (with Ellen Burstyn, Jane Curtin and Ann-Margret) in “Queen Bees” last year and has another film still due out. More than that, he had maintained an active presence on Twitter, frequently sharing images from his films and memories of his collaborators and always concluding his messages with the phrase “End of tweet.”Yet Caan was a series of contradictions: a Jewish actor best known for playing an Italian, a leading man who never quite became a movie star, an actor equally adept at playing strength and weakness, rage and vulnerability. His attack on his abusive brother-in-law in “The Godfather” is one of the most visceral scenes of violence in movie history. But just the year before, he had starred in a film still remembered for its ability to make men cry. We’ll begin our look at his long, varied career there.1971‘Brian’s Song’Rent or buy it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Caan had already banked several years of television work and a handful of juicy film roles (including memorable appearances in Howard Hawks’s “El Dorado” and “Red Line 7000” and Robert Altman’s “Countdown”) when he starred in this “ABC Movie of the Week.” Caan and Billy Dee Williams starred as the real-life Chicago Bears teammates Brian Piccolo and Gale Sayers, the first interracial roommates in the history of the N.F.L. and best friends until Piccolo’s untimely death from cancer in 1970. Caan and Williams’s easy rapport sells the relationship, and Caan is truly heartbreaking in the closing scenes, which prove a too-rare showcase for his tenderness and warmth.1972‘The Godfather’Stream it on Paramount+. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Caan’s breakthrough role came the following year in Francis Ford Coppola’s sensational adaptation of the best seller by Mario Puzo. The director — who had used Caan to great effect, in a much gentler role, in “The Rain People” (1969) — cast the actor as Sonny, the hot-tempered oldest brother in the Corleone clan. The studio wanted Caan to play Michael (executives didn’t care at all for this Pacino kid Coppola was stuck on), but the filmmaker knew Caan had the mixture of ladies’ man charisma and brute force so essential to Sonny. It was a scene-stealing role, and Caan took advantage of it, playing the character’s many memorable moments to the hilt: his memorable in flagrante delicto entrance, his mocking “bada bing!” moment with Michael, that street-fight humiliation of his brother-in-law and, most of all, his shocking, bullet-ridden last gasps on the Jones Beach Causeway.1974‘The Gambler’Rent or buy it onAmazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.As with most of the actors associated with “The Godfather,” Caan was quickly elevated to leading roles in the wake of its astonishing success. The best of that bunch may well have been this spiky tale of a privileged English professor who finds that his high-society pedigree and formidable intellect are no match for a spiraling gambling addiction. Caan’s duality — his ability to seem to move between worlds, ethnicities and classes — was rarely more effective than here, as his Axel Freed must seem at home both in the classroom, lecturing about the works of Dostoyevsky, and in the back rooms of New York’s seedy gambling underbelly, trying to buy more time from his bookie.1975‘Rollerball’Rent or buy it on Amazon, Apple TV, and Vudu.In our current cinematic landscape, an actor who fronts critical successes like “The Godfather” and “The Gambler” is usually ripe for picking by the Superhero Industrial Complex, handed a nice payday and an easy shoot in exchange for lending class and gravitas to a popcorn movie. Caan’s taking the lead in Norman Jewison’s big-budget sports movie could have looked like the same move, downshifting his considerable onscreen intelligence into something a bit brawnier. But “Rollerball” is no typical sports movie. Set in the then-distant future of 2018, it’s a prescient warning of the dangers of corporate overreach, overt violence and class warfare in sports entertainment — and society in general — and Caan conveys both the character’s fierce physicality and his intellect with ease.1981‘Thief’Stream it on Tubi. Rent or buy it on Vudu.Caan turned in arguably his finest performance — and certainly his most soulful — in this astonishing combination of crime movie and middle-age melodrama from the writer-director Michael Mann (“Heat”). Mann specializes in working-class criminals, guys who see their work as a job and nothing more, a way to make a living without punching a clock. Few actors understood that character like Caan, who plays the safecracker, jewel thief and ex-con Frank as a man who will break the law but not his moral code, and who so longs for the fruits of his labor that he carries around a collage of his imagined perfect, suburban life like a mobile vision board. Caan wears the heaviness of the character like a winter coat; he does what he has to do to get by, forever grasping for the last big score that always seems just out of reach.1990‘Misery’Stream it on Showtime. Rent or buy it on most major platforms.Caan spent much of the ’80s in a self-imposed exile, burned out from his busy ’70s, battling addictions and caring for his children. He stepped back into the industry with this Rob Reiner adaptation of Stephen King’s best seller, but did so with a generosity of spirit: Rather than choosing a solo vehicle that would show off his gifts, he took the decidedly secondary role of bedridden novelist Paul Sheldon and ceded the spotlight to the relative newcomer Kathy Bates, who had the much showier role of his obsessed superfan Annie Wilkes. She won an Oscar, and thanked him profusely in her acceptance speech: “I really am your No. 1 fan, Jimmy.”1992‘Honeymoon in Vegas’Rent or buy it on Apple TV+; buy it on Amazon.Caan spent the ’90s easing into his new position as a respected character actor, with copious supporting roles both in film and on television. The remnants of Sonny Corleone made him a no-brainer for villain roles, and he played them well, but some of his most memorable work inverted and confounded those expectations. One of the best examples was this romantic comedy from the writer-director Andrew Bergman, starring Nicolas Cage as a newlywed who gambles away a weekend with his wife (Sarah Jessica Parker) to Caan’s high roller. On paper, the character is reprehensible — but Caan invests him with a lovelorn sweetness that lends the picture, and its central conflict, some unexpected ripples.1996‘Bottle Rocket’Stream it on HBO Max. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Caan may have had visions of John Travolta’s “Pulp Fiction” comeback when he accepted a supporting role in the up-and-coming Wes Anderson’s debut feature, a cockeyed caper picture about a crew of incompetent criminals. It didn’t have the same result — the film didn’t find its audience until years later, after Anderson had established himself — but Caan’s unsung comic side shines in the role of Mr. Henry, an imposing criminal mastermind (and the proprietor of a successful landscaping firm). It was one of his finest late-career performances, deploying his still-potent tough-guy demeanor and undercutting it with unexpected, self-aware wit.2003‘Elf’Stream it on HBO Max. Rent or buy on most major platforms.When you live and work for as long as Caan did, you become beloved by each generation for a different role, and if boomers loved him for “The Godfather” and Gen Xers for “Bottle Rocket,” this smash family comedy endeared him to Generation Z. A lesser actor, cast in the role of the father to the North Pole elf Buddy (Will Ferrell), might’ve winked or mugged and ruined the whole thing; Caan wisely played this harried dad close to the bone, keenly aware that the straighter his face, the funnier his scenes. Drama, comedy, suspense, action, kids’ movies — there was truly nothing James Caan couldn’t do. More

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    James Caan, Actor Who Won Fame in ‘The Godfather,’ Dies at 82

    A Bronx native, he starred in countless movies and TV shows, but was most closely identified with the volatile character Sonny Corleone.James Caan, who built a durable film career in varied roles across six decades but was forever identified most closely with one of his earliest characters, the quick-tempered, skirt-chasing Sonny Corleone in the original “Godfather” movie, died on Wednesday. He was 82. His death was announced by his family on Twitter and confirmed by his manager, Matt DelPiano. Both his family and his manager declined to say where he died or cite a cause.By the time “The Godfather” was released in 1972, Mr. Caan had established himself as a young actor worth keeping an eye on. He had a meaty role in “El Dorado,” a 1966 western that starred John Wayne and Robert Mitchum. (Wayne, Mr. Caan said, cheated at chess games during breaks in the filming.)In “The Rain People,” a 1969 movie that was his first collaboration with the director Francis Ford Coppola, he earned critical praise playing a simple-minded former football player.“Brian’s Song” (1971), an early made-for-television movie, brought him to the attention of a wider audience. Based on a true story, it focused on the friendship between a Black football star, Gale Sayers of the Chicago Bears (played by Billy Dee Williams), and a white teammate, Brian Piccolo. Piccolo died of cancer in 1970 at 26, and Mr. Caan played him with verve and humor in an unabashedly three-hanky film.Then came Mr. Coppola’s “Godfather.” Initially cast as the central figure, Michael Corleone — the role ultimately played by Al Pacino — Mr. Caan ended up playing Sonny, quick to anger and ultimately gunned down on a causeway. He threw himself into the role so fully that for years, he said, strangers would say things to him like “Hey, don’t go through that tollbooth again.”Some even mistook him for a real mobster. “I’ve been accused so many times,” he told Vanity Fair in 2004. “I won ‘Italian of the Year’ twice in New York, and I’m not Italian.”He was in fact Jewish, reared in Sunnyside, Queens, by German-born parents. “I was denied in a country club once,” he said. “Oh, yeah, the guy sat in front of the board and he says, ‘No, no, he’s a wiseguy, been downtown. He’s a made guy.’ I thought, ‘What, are you out of your mind?’ ”Mr. Caan received an Emmy nomination for best actor for “Brian’s Song” and an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor for “The Godfather.” His Oscar competition included Mr. Pacino and another “Godfather” actor, Robert Duvall. The three canceled one another out, and the award went to Joel Grey for “Cabaret.”Mr. Caan’s performance as the pro football player Brian Piccolo in the 1971 television movie “Brian’s Song” earned him an Emmy nomination.ABCBy then, Mr. Caan’s career had kicked into high gear. The decade that followed was especially fertile. Among his roles were a love-struck sailor in “Cinderella Liberty” (1973), a self-destructive professor in “The Gambler” (1974), an anti-authority athlete in “Rollerball” (1975), a fierce World War II sergeant in “A Bridge Too Far” (1977) and a not-too-bright ex-con in “Thief” (1981), a favorite movie of his.Not all his films received favorable notices, but with his rugged good looks and obvious smarts, his acting usually did. Reviewing “Cinderella Liberty” for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote: “Mr. Caan seems to be shaping up as the Paul Newman of the nineteen-seventies. An intelligent, versatile actor with a low-key but unmistakable public personality.”Like Paul Newman, Mr. Caan tried his hand at directing. But he did so only once, with “Hide in Plain Sight” (1980), in which he also acted, playing a man searching for his children after they and their mother are brought into the government’s witness-protection program. The film fared poorly at the box office and left him disenchanted.“Everybody wants to do ‘Rocky 9’ and ‘Airport 96’ and ‘Jaws 7,’ ” he said in 1981. “And you look and you listen, and what little idealism you have left slowly dwindles.”Mr. Caan with the actress Lilyan Chauvin, left, and his wife at the time, the actress Sheila Ryan, at a movie preview in 1975.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn his prime, Mr. Caan had a man’s-man reputation that he savored. In interviews, he strewed four-letter words like birdseed. He earned a sixth-degree black belt in karate. He roped steers on the rodeo circuit and managed a boxer — pursuits, especially rodeo, that left him with so many stitches and screws in his shoulders and arms that the sportswriter Jim Murray once said, “Jimmy Caan was not born, he was embroidered.”Mr. Caan also had a bad-boy reputation. He was married and divorced four times. He appeared as a character witness for an old friend from Queens who was on trial as a mobster because, he said, stand-up guys stay loyal to their pals. And he had his own brushes with the law.The police questioned him at length in 1993 after a man fell to his death from the fire escape of a Los Angeles apartment where Mr. Caan was staying. The authorities concluded that the death was accidental, and Mr. Caan said he was asleep when it occurred.The next year the North Hollywood police arrested him after he flashed a loaded pistol in public. He said he had done it only to break up a fight. The charges were dropped.Along the way, he checked into a rehab center for an addiction to cocaine that began after his sister, Barbara Licker, died of leukemia in 1981. The two of them had been close — she was president of a movie production company that included James and their brother, Ronald — and her death hit him hard.He barely worked for the next six years and wound up deep in debt. “I got into the whole lifestyle of girls and drugs and partying,” he told Entertainment Weekly, adding that “you really do get caught up in it, and it’s very destructive.”Mr. Caan in a scene from another of his best-known films, “Misery” (1990), in which he played a writer held captive by a crazed fan.Columbia Pictures/Getty ImagesBut he bounced back, starting in 1987 with the Vietnam War drama “Gardens of Stone,” another collaboration with Mr. Coppola, in which he played a tough sergeant. He then took on roles including a writer held captive by a crazed fan (played by Kathy Bates) in the box-office hit “Misery” (1990), directed by Rob Reiner and based on a novel by Stephen King; a tough but romantic mob guy in “Honeymoon in Vegas” (1992); yet another mobster in the comedy “Mickey Blue Eyes” (1999); and a cantankerous book editor in “Elf” (2003).He also turned to television, notably the series “Las Vegas,” on which he was seen from 2003 to 2007 as the president of operations and security chief for a casino. Still, though he worked steadily, his later career lacked the incandescence of his earlier years.Born on March 26, 1940, in the Bronx, James Edmund Caan grew up in Queens, the son of Arthur Caan, a wholesale dealer of kosher meat, and Sophie (Falkenstein) Caan, a homemaker.Street life held his interest more than classrooms did. He dropped out of several schools before settling down at Rhodes Preparatory School in Manhattan, where he graduated in 1956 at age 16.At Michigan State University, he hoped to make the football team but failed. He switched to Hofstra University on Long Island — Mr. Coppola was a classmate — but dropped out before long. Nonetheless, his interest in acting was kindled there. He went on to study for five years at the well-regarded Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater in Manhattan.Mr. Caan at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif., in 2010.Hugh Hamilton for The New York TimesAt around that time he met an actress named Dee Jay Mathis, who became the first of his four wives (the lengths of his marriages ranged from 12 years to barely a year). He is survived by his brother, Ronald; five children, the actor Scott Caan and Tara, Alexander, James and Jacob Caan; and four grandchildren. Mr. Caan’s early work included roles in 1960s television series like “Route 66,” “Dr. Kildare” and “Wagon Train.” Movies soon loomed, with “The Godfather” dominant.In that film, he said, he had improvised some of his lines and actions, including two words that he did not invent but that he ushered into the vernacular. Sonny tells Michael how hard it will be to kill the family’s enemies: “You gotta get up like this and — bada bing! — you blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit.”“Bada bing? Bada boom? I said that, didn’t I?” Mr. Caan said in an interview with Vanity Fair. “Or did I just say bada bing? It just came out of my mouth. I don’t know from where.” More