NEW YORK CITY - James Caan delights in telling how he was twice voted "Italian Of The Year" by unspecified Italian-American organizations.

He acknowledges that it's an honest mistake.

"I grew up with everybody Italian in my my neighbourhood," he says. "We all talked the same, you know what I mean? And if you talk with a Brooklyn accent, people automatically think you're Italian."

Seated in a midtown Manhattan hotel, Caan nods east, towards Queens, to indicate his birthplace. "I grew up in Sunnyside," he says. "I don't know why they call it Sunnyside. It's the antithesis of anything sunny. We had a tree about eight blocks from the house. We called it the forest."

Caan is Jewish-Irish. The Italian impression comes not just from his birthplace, but from the persistent memory of his performance as the volatile Mafia scion Sonny Corleone in the classic Mob movie The Godfather.

Handsome, tough, intense, the young Caan looked the part. But his background doubtless helped him nail that role. "Not exactly bakers" was the way he described his criminal cronies back when he explained how he became familiar with the Mob milieu.

Now 60, the still-muscular actor says he still keeps contact with his old friends. In the role of a Mob chieftain in the Hugh Grant comedy Mickey Blue Eyes, Caan says he was actually visited on the set by a few wiseguy pals in a scene where he and Grant were supposed to be burying a body in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

"It's four in the morning and it's freezing and we're digging and a couple of guys came to visit," he says. "Right in the middle of the take, the guy goes, 'Hey Shoulders!' -- they used to call me Shoulders -- 'Hey Shoulders, don't dig too deep over there, all right?' "

If some Mob guys liked Caan, he reciprocated with his own affection. After making The Godfather, Caan says he had a friendly relationship with gangster Meyer Lansky. He's in an ideal position to comment on the public's long-running fascination with the Mafia.

"I think it had to do with honour and people just liked that sense of honour for family and loyalty," he says. "In those days it was so romantic, everybody just loved the mystery and the whole behind-the-scenes thing of the Mafia, but unfortunately today it's turned to crap. It ain't what it used to be."

Curiously, Caan seems to blame the success of law enforcement for tarnishing the Mafia romance. Thanks to the U.S.'s Rico law that targets organized crime, harsh sentences have made for tough times on godfathers. (Ask John Gotti.) A mobster, he says, used to accept a 10-year prison sentence "so he could get his kids into college and make them doctors or lawyers. That's the way it was.

"But today, my God, they throw numbers around like 50 years. And these people are already wealthy, so they're just doing it to be gangsters," he says. "Everybody wants to be a criminal but they don't want to commit the crimes."

So how do his connected friends react to movies about the Mob?

"They laugh," Caan says. "It's another form of flattery. If somebody's imitating me, I find that to be flattering, even if they're making fun of me. It kind of justifies your existence, you know? It verifies it."

Mobsters might find themselves laughing even harder at Mickey Blue Eyes, in which they are essentially the butt of the joke. Grant plays a genteel art dealer eager to marry into The Family. Caan says comedy is one of the only viable ways left to make Mafia movies.

"The truth is we've done so many of them, they're so stereotyped, there's nothing left but to make fun."

Upon leaving the room, James Caan prepares gathered reporters for Hugh Grant by taking a shot at him, in a good-natured way.

"I had to warm him up for you because he's so boring and so British, you know what I mean?" Caan says. "Such a nervous stiff ... "

Grant, Caan says, had reason to feel under the gun, so to speak, while making Mickey Blue Eyes. He and significant other Elizabeth Hurley also produced the comedy for their company Simian Films. He also gave the script an uncredited polish.

"He couldn't afford to laugh," Caan says, adding impetuously, "Tell 'im Jimmy said you have to speak very slowly and distinctly to him."

Once seated, Grant effortlessly returns the volley.

"He was confusing me with himself," he says. "Jimmy is now very very old."

Grant, on the other hand is just 38, or as he says, "a wonderfully young-looking 38."

He was born in London and raised in relative comfort, compared to Caan. He broke into the acting career on the London stage, then broke into a big-time acting career as the stuttering romantic hero who attempts to sweep Andie MacDowell off her feet in the 1994 comedy Four Weddings And A Funeral.

Grant has subsequently made something of a specialty of romantic comedies. His last one, Notting Hill, was released only two months ago. In almost every film, he's maintained the mild-mannered veneer of an English gentleman. But he's the first to admit to enjoying the primitive pleasures of the gangster movies such as Goodfellas and The Godfather.

"I know that among English guys like me, growing up, we worshipped those films," he says. "I can only suppose it seemed to be a manlier world that our sad, tea-drinking suburban lives.

"It's something pretty masculine and dangerous and exciting and something I've always loved," he says. "I've always been very hurt since I became a professional actor. Martin Scorsese has never telephoned me and asked me to do one of those things, because I always like to think I bring a kind of danger and menace to the screen," he says facetiously. (I'd estimate Grant is facetious a good 60 per cent of the time.)

Post-Krays era British crime, Grant says, offered little fuel to the imagination.

"We have a rather sad East End organized crime, but they all look like girls' blouses next to the Italian Mob."

Thus Grant steeped himself in the pop lore of the American Mafia. And when he and Hurley took on the task of producing Mickey Blue Eyes, he says "we were very keen to get it right."

Thus, Grant, Hurley, director Kelly Makin and co-star Jeanne Tripplehorn set up visits with authentic New York mobsters and even let them offer suggestions to the script.

"They thought it was pretty accurate anyway but they gave us a couple of notes," Grant says. "And then of course we cast the whole film out of their number. Almost everyone who plays a mobster in this film -- and this is where I have to tread very carefully -- is very, very well-researched in that area.

"We wanted all that authenticity because the Mob are very funny in themselves, you know, you don't need to add anything or parody them or any of that stuff."

In this research phase, Grant discovered that Mafiosi were not above the use of verbal delicacy when describing, for example, someone serving time.

"I always liked that, when you're having dinner with them, they'd say, 'Lenny's away right now.' 'Oh where, to the seaside?' 'He's away.'

In fact, Grant got so wrapped up researching the Mafia, he says he "forgot" to research his own role of an auctioneer.

"On the last day (of pre-production), I picked up and went to Sotheby's to watch an auction, and the guy went so fast, I thought, 'Sod that, I can't do any of that,'

"So I just invented my own method, which I think you'll find is widely imitated," he says, adding that he does regret the oversight.

"If I'd been Daniel Day-Lewis, I'd have lived as an auctioneer for five years and married one of them and slept with a hammer between my buttock cheeks," he says.

It's delightfully uncharacteristic. Evidently, while among the Mob, or perhaps hanging with Caan, Grant learned a thing or two about how to take a shot.


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