When James Caan learned how to crack a safe for Michael Mann: “Jimmy, break in”
In 1979, James Caan was ambling from the set of Neil Simon’s romantic comedy Chapter Two to his trailer. Sitting outside the trailer was a young man holding a manila envelope. He asked if he could speak to the Godfather star for a few minutes, and then handed him the envelope, which contained a screenplay inspired by the true crime book The Home Invaders: Confessions of a Cat Burglar. It turned out the guy was Michael Mann, then a young director who had only made one TV movie – but the script was so good that Caan quickly agreed to play the lead. Little did he know that he would then embark upon a journey into criminality that would culminate in him learning how to crack a safe for real.
When Caan began working on Mann’s film, which he had titled Thief, he quickly realised that this director wouldn’t settle for anything less than absolute authenticity, even on his first feature film. In a move that would come to define Mann’s approach to every film he’d ever make, the director hired real cops and criminals as actors and technical consultants. Therefore, as Caan was playing a professional safecracker trying to retire from a life of crime, it only made sense to Mann that Caan should learn the trade from a couple of notorious Chicago thieves.
When Caan and co-star Jim Belushi began hanging out with master thieves John Santucci and WR ‘Bill’ Brown, they quickly realised these guys were no joke. “I got there a month early,” Caan told Consequence. “We hung around with them for quite a while.” He found out that the police had never busted either Santucci or Brown because they were so good at their jobs.
Amazingly, the two thieves also conformed to the Hollywood ideal of a criminal with a code, especially Brown. Dennis Farina, a cop who was hired by Mann – and would later become an actor in his own right – told Belushi, “Bill Brown, he’s one of the good ones. He’s a gentleman thief. He didn’t kill nobody; he didn’t hurt nobody. He just went in there and got the shit.”
Ironically, Mann actually had Santucci play a cop in the movie who roughs Caan up at one point – and he didn’t exactly pull his punches. Caan claimed he “was a nut. A freaking nut” and explained, “When he stopped me with the car and all that, they gave me some beating…They beat the shit out of me. I said, ‘I’ll get you, you bastards.'”
After hanging out with hardened criminals and taking a couple of good-natured pastings, though, it came time for the movie’s piece de resistance. The scene in which Caan’s character breaks into a seemingly impenetrable Richmond locker safe with a 200-pound magnetic drill is pure Mann. It’s a pulsingly soundtracked, moodily lit, intensely meticulous demonstration of a dedicated man’s mastery of his craft – even if that craft is highly, highly illegal. Incredibly, though, there was no Hollywood trickery involved. Instead, Caan genuinely learned how to crack the safe.
As Caan explained in a Criterion interview, the safe crack was one of the last scenes on the shooting schedule. He had absorbed as many tricks of the trade as he could from Santucci and Brown, but he was still shocked when he was told, “Jimmy, break in.” The incredulous star responded, “What?!” to which Mann said, “Go ahead. Go into the safe.” Caan still didn’t quite believe his director and gave a dismissive, “You gotta be kidding me.” Mann wasn’t kidding, though, and before he knew it, Caan was holding the heavy drill as it burrowed its way into four inches of steel.
After several minutes of painstaking work – all the while making sure he held off the pressure when the drill hit the copper underlayer – Caan finally made it through. This was when he realised Mann had been shooting the whole time, so he took a hammer and chisel and knocked the safe’s door in. As soon as it clanged open, a cheer erupted from the set, and Caan grinned, “I felt like I’d just graduated from Harvard or something. It was great; one of my proudest moments. I called my mother, and she said, ‘That’s my boy.'”
Naturally, though, Caan neglected to mention what his new criminal buddies felt about him phoning his mother immediately after cracking one of the toughest safes in the business.
