‘The Godfather’ scene that pissed off James Caan: “I couldn’t watch the rest of the film”
James Caan was a Hollywood legend, and his incendiary performance as Santino ‘Sonny’ Corleone in The Godfather is one of that mob classic’s greatest elements. Interestingly, though, his performance could have been even better if one particular scene hadn’t wound up on the cutting room floor.
In fact, finding out this scene had been excised from the movie rankled Caan so badly that he stormed out of a screening. Getting on the wrong side of the actor probably isn’t good for anyone’s health, too, because the man can hold a grudge. After all, 50 years later, he was still miffed at director Francis Ford Coppola for choosing to cut it.
In 2022, The Hollywood Reporter gathered a host of The Godfather’s key players to discuss the film’s legacy at 50. Actors Talia Shire, Robert Duvall, and John Martino joined Caan in sharing their memories of the iconic film’s shoot.
Shire, who played Connie Corleone and was nominated for the ‘Best Supporting Actress’ Oscar for The Godfather Part II, was full of praise for an unusual acting technique she learned from Marlon Brando on-set. She marvelled, “There is a term actors use called ‘active listening.’ It’s not always when you say your lines that you pay attention; it is the listening to all the others around you.” To make sure he was paying extra close attention to the nuances of his co-star’s performances, Brando put wax in his ears. It meant he was always straining to hear them, but it made him a better listener, and this informed his performance.
Duvall’s abiding memory of the film was shooting the scene where his character, Tom Hagen, tells Brando’s Don Vito that Sonny has been killed. Duvall revealed that he and Brando nailed the scene in two takes, and Coppola asked if they wanted another one, but they refused. Duvall noted that film acting isn’t always so different from theatre, and things can happen within the first couple of takes that may not happen again. For his money, Coppola was smart enough not to push for more takes.
Duvall also revealed The Godfather was more fun to shoot than Part II for one solitary reason: Caan wasn’t around for the sequel. He smiled, “Jimmy made it so funny“. However, Caan wasn’t laughing about one of his major memories of the shoot.
Michael, played with dead-eyed perfection by Al Pacino, embracing the family business for the first time by killing drug dealer Virgil Sollozzo and corrupt cop Mark McCluskey is one of the Godfather’s most famous scenes. In the buildup to it, though, there is a sequence where Sonny warns Michael, “You’ll get brains all over your nice Ivy League suit”.
Fascinatingly, though, Caan revealed that there was actually another scene before this one in which he and Duvall had around ten pages of dialogue to work through. Caan thought the scene worked brilliantly, but when he sat down at a cast screening and saw it had been cut entirely, he was enraged.
He grumbled, “Francis cut all of it out! I was so pissed off, I couldn’t watch the rest of the film.” However, he then quickly added, “But otherwise, he gave me a great honor”.
Amusingly, Martino chimed in that he also remembered this scene because he was on set at the time. He said, “They were discussing Paulie Gatto and whether he or Clemenza was the traitor.”
Then, perhaps in a playful dig at Caan, he added, “There were many scenes cut, but I was lucky; they didn’t cut any of my scenes. And every one of my scenes was one take”.
