Remembering James Caan

It in no way shortchanges the brilliance of James Caan, who died Wednesday at 82, to point out that he had a special gift for playing insensitive men. He was a gruff, tough, raging, muscular actor, with a ramrod physicality and an imposing look: the wiry curls of brownish-blond hair, the handsome planed face that seemed carved out of granite, the mouth set in a scowl that was a challenge and often a threat. (You got the feeling that even his brain knew how to bench-press.) In “The Godfather,” the movie that not only established him as a great actor but marked him as a mythological presence, Caan played Santino “Sonny” Corleone, the lone hothead in a family of very cool criminals. Don Vito was a courtly, soft-spoken manipulator, Michael a moody intellectual, Fredo a black-sheep nebbish, and Tom Hagen the adoptive sibling as passive bureaucrat.