They came from behind the camera

As Roman Polanski pops up in the latest ’Rush Hour‘ film (yes, really), Ben Walters looks at filmmakers who have acted in other directors‘ movies – some of them with a little more dignity…

There are several odd sights in ‘Rush Hour 3’, the latest entry in the godawful buddy-cop action franchise: a fight scene with 7'9" basketball player Sun Ming Ming; a nun colluding in the torture of a police suspect; Jackie Chan’s ongoing grudge match with the English language.

Oddest of all, however, is the spectacle of Roman Polanski – director of ‘Knife in the Water’, ‘Repulsion’ and ‘The Pianist’ – dressed as a French police chief, snapping on a latex glove and telling our heroes to assume the position. ‘Welcome to Paris’, he smiles, finger at the ready.

Orson Welles, 'Treasure Island'

While Polanski might show chutzpah in taking a role solely defined by questionable sexual practices and law enforcement, his participation cannot be said to show great aesthetic judgement. But just as he is far from the first director to take an acting gig in another man’s film, he is far from the first to take a bad one. Not that it’s Polanski’s first time in front of the camera: he held his own against Gerard Depardieu in the 1994 two-hander ‘A Pure Formality’ and made an unforgettable cameo in his own ‘Chinatown’, as the hood who whips out a flick-knife to ventilate Jack Nicholson’s nose. That film also had a superb role for a veteran filmmaker: its supremely hateful prime mover, Noah Cross, was marvellously played by John Huston, who by then had directed some three dozen features, including ‘The Maltese Falcon’, ‘The African Queen’ and ‘The Misfits’.

In fact, Huston had been acting since before he directed and kept his hand in throughout his career. Around the same time as ‘Chinatown’, he took the lead in ‘The Other Side of the Wind’, Orson Welles’ experimental feature about an ageing movie director, Jake Hannaford, who refuses to go down without a fight. (Where’d he get the idea for that one?) All but completed, the film was never released and remains in legal limbo, but the snatches of footage that have emerged show Huston on robust form. ‘All right, sweetie,’ he drawls as Hannaford directing a sex scene. ‘You know where to go. Let’s have that tongue…’

Sydney Pollack (left), 'Eyes Wide Shut'

Of course, Welles himself had been acting since childhood, and was able – indeed, forced – to exploit his star status as a performer to garner funds for his work as director. Even as his reputation as a filmmaker of genius grew and grew, he found fewer and fewer backers for his own pictures, despite a constant stream of fascinating ideas. It was this situation, rather than laziness or greed, that led him from discerning acting work for other directors – Robert Stevenson’s ‘Jane Eyre’, Carol Reed’s ‘The Third Man’ – to the string of indiscriminate, self-parodying walk-ons for which he became infamous. Welles was always happy to put his acting career at the service of his directing – sometimes outrageously, as when he lifted props and costumes from ‘Prince of Foxes’ for use in his own ‘Othello’, or played hooky from ‘Treasure Island’ to use its locations for work on his ‘Chimes at Midnight’.

Erich von Stroheim, 'Sunset Blvd'

Welles had his own unique gravitas, but plenty of other filmmakers have been cast for the air of authority they can bring to a role. Huston was commanding even under simian prosthetics as the Lawgiver of the ‘Planet of the Apes’; Otto Preminger was an imposing, sadistic camp commandant in Billy Wilder’s ‘Stalag 17’; Mark Rydell (who made ‘The Fox’, ‘The Cowboys’ and later ‘On Golden Pond’ and ‘For the Boys’) was a cracking Little Napoleon in Altman’s ‘The Long Goodbye’. Erich von Stroheim was terrific as the aristocratic von Rauffenstein in Renoir’s ‘La Grande Illusion’, but his career in front of the camera also showed how such grandeur could be undermined: in ‘Sunset Blvd’ (Wilder again, also squeezing Keaton and De Mille into the frame), he delivered a wonderfully self-mocking performance as Norma Desmond’s butler, Max von Mayerling – a servant whose noble name slyly pointed up the fakeness of Stroheim’s own affected persona.

Other directors have been more than happy to present themselves as bottom-feeders. Spike Jonze played dumb in ‘Three Kings’ and John Waters has accepted cameos as a used car salesman (Jonathan Demme’s ‘Something Wild’), a sleazy tabloid hack (‘Bride of Chucky’) and a flasher (the remake of his own ‘Hairspray’). Other castings, meanwhile, denote affection, even hero-worship: Clint Eastwood got his filmmaking mentor Don Siegel to play an avuncular barkeep in his own directorial debut, ‘Play Misty For Me’, while Spielberg cast Truffaut as the inspirational UFOlogist Claude Lacombe in ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’.

Werner Herzog, 'Julien Donkey-Boy'

There is also a small clutch of directors who have established a niche as distinctive character performers. David Cronenberg, for instance, has cornered the market in calm, well-dressed, sinister creeps (‘Nightbreed’, ‘To Die For’, ‘Last Night’, ‘Jason X’), while Sydney Pollack is often to be a found as a slightly flustered, blustery upper-middle-class professional flirting with crisis or breakdown (‘Tootsie’, ‘Husbands and Wives’, ‘Eyes Wide Shut’, ‘Changing Lanes’). Probably best of all is Werner Herzog, whose magnetic, obsessive personality is glimpsed in many of his documentaries but has been brilliantly parlayed into demented bit parts in Harmony Korine’s ‘Julien Donkey-Boy’ and ‘Mister Lonely’, as well as Zak Penn’s forthcoming poker comedy ‘The Grand’.

Polanski’s turn in ‘Rush Hour 3’ cannot, then, be ranked as one of the great director cameos – not least because it’s such a missed opportunity. When his police chief pops up again at the end of the movie, it’s to land kisses on the faces of the movie’s insufferable leads. As the fellow critic to my left murmured, ‘if only he’d brought the flick-knife…’

‘Rush Hour 3’ is out now.