The fight James Caan had on the set of ‘The Godfather’
After giving early roles in Robert Altman’s 1967 film Countdown and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People, James Caan began to establish himself as a true Hollywood hero, particularly when he made a remarkable effort in the television movie Brian’s Song, from which point he never looked back.
Caan often played troubled and aggressive characters, such as in Brian De Palma’s Thief, in which he portrayed a professional jewel thief who longs for a normal life but can never quite escape the world of crime. Caan also possessed a versatility, though, as shown through his performances in the likes of Misery and Elf.
Perhaps the most iconic of Caan’s character efforts, though, had to be his violent and striking turn as Sonny Corleone in The Godfather. The eldest son of Don Vito Corleone and Carmela Corleone and the older brother of Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone is easily the member of the family with the hottest temper, as many of the other characters in the film find out.
In fact, few Godfather figures learned of Sonny’s wrath, quite like his brother-in-law Carlo Rizzi, the abusive husband of Sonny’s only sister. Played by Gianni Russo, even the actor playing Carlo found that it wasn’t just Sonny who had a hot temper, but that Caan also could fly off the handle at any given moment.
The Godfather features a scene in which Sonny beats up Carlo, and Russo once explained how even he got a beating from Caan, seeing as their professional relationship hit the skids as soon as the production of the filming went ahead. “Sonny and I had a problem all through the movie, on and off the set,” Russo had once told EW.
According to Russo, the scene for the fight had been “choreographed” for “about a day and a half”. However, when the scene came time to be filmed, Caan began to become “aggressive”. Russo explained, “He improvised a few things like that little billy club he threw at me when I came off the stoop. He hit me right in the head with that.”
Another improvised moment that caught Russo by surprise was when his character was thrown over a railing and had his hands bitten by Sonny, which, according to the actor, wasn’t “supposed to happen”. However, it came down to the sheer aggression of Caan, who was said to have been annoyed at Russo’s “familiarity” with the Harlem neighbourhoods of New York City, where the shoot had been taking place.
Russo came out of the scene with two broken ribs but refused to complain about it, seeing as it was his first film role, and didn’t want to upset any producers and thereby ruin his career before it had even begun. Still, the incident left a sour taste in the actor’s mouth, who noted, “Jimmy and I are not friends at all, believe me. The guy’s nuts.”
Caan’s altercation with Russo was not the only time the actor had had a run-in with a cast or crew member on set, because when he was making The Killer Elite with Sam Peckinpah, he had threatened to “kick” the director’s “ass”, even though he possessed a tremendous amount of respect for him. So, if the account of Russo was anything to go by, then James Caan was not someone you wanted to mess with.
