From ‘Hide In Plain Sight’ to ‘Funny Lady’: James Caan on the best movies of his career
In a town full of actors pretending to be tough guys, James Caan walked the walk. Growing up in Queens, he demonstrated a flair for physical altercations that would serve him well as an actor and real-life hooligan. During the production of The Godfather, he was known to hang out with an actual mafioso and future crime boss, which put him on the radar of the New York authorities.
He was also a black belt in karate, a motorcycle enthusiast, and even tried his hand at rodeo riding. Then, there were multiple arrests regarding assaults, the accidental death of one of his houseguests, and a prostitution ring. He would later say that he’d never paid for sex workers in anything other than cocaine.
The fact that Caan also had time in between these extracurricular follies to be a movie star is a real accomplishment. He started acting in the 1960s on the stage and in television and movies, with his breakout role coming in Howard Hawks’ 1966 western El Dorado. Starring John Wayne as a gunslinger trying to protect a family from a gang of thugs, it provided Caan with the perfect opportunity to show his abilities as an actor who could spar with the best of them. Playing Mississippi, he’s a young misfit who teams up with Wayne and Robert Mitchum to defend the ranching family.
Although he worked right up until his death in 2022, Caan’s most famous performance will always be as the volatile, violent young Sonny Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. It earned him an Oscar nomination and set the tone for the types of characters he would play for the rest of his career.
You might think that Coppola’s masterpiece would be one of the actor’s most cherished films, but in a 2022 interview with Collider shortly before he died, Caan revealed four films that he was “extra proud of,” and The Godfather didn’t make the list.
Michael Mann’s 1981 heist movie Thief made the cut, as did the actor’s only directorial foray, the 1980 drama Hide in Plain Sight, and Karel Reisz’s tense 1974 crime drama The Gambler. “And oddly enough, I like little funny things like Funny Lady,” Caan concluded, saying, “It’s always the ones that I had a good time in.” The film, which was a sequel to 1968’s Funny Girl, starred Barbra Streisand as the real-life singer and comedian Fanny Brice and was a box office hit that was poorly received by critics.
More interestingly is Hide in Plain Sight, purely because it was the only time Caan directed a film. In it, he plays a working-class father trying to gain custody of his two young children after his ex-wife marries a petty mobster. There are many actors who have tried their hand at directing after reaching the peak of their stardom, but few have done it well, and those who do manage to pull it off usually make a second career out of it.
Caan, in contrast, was praised for his directing when the film was released but never helmed another picture. In the interview with Collider, he said that he’d only made the movie because he couldn’t get Hal Ashby to do it, but didn’t elaborate as to why he never directed again. Perhaps if he had, his reputation as one of Hollywood’s pre-eminent tough guys would be different.
