James Caan was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Sonny Corleone, a performance built entirely on a temper the character cannot govern, and the toll booth sequence is one of the most famous deaths in American film.
Thief, for Michael Mann, is the better performance and the less seen one: a safecracker whose long monologue about a photograph collage is the film’s centre.
He took most of the 1980s off, citing his sister’s death and cocaine use, and returned with Misery, playing a writer immobilised for almost the entire film, which required him to act with his face alone.
Elf gave him a late comic register, and he was consistently better than the material he chose in the last two decades.
