10 Insane Ways Directors Appeared In Their Own Movies

Post-War noir The Third Man contains quite possibly the finest performance from a leading film director acting in another director's movie in the form of Orson Welles as black market profiteer Harry Lime.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, having to wrangle such an egotistical and opinionated director-as-performer was an endless challenge for this movie's actual director, Carol Reed. (Many scenes where Lime is seen from behind or in shadow and so didn't need to show Welles's face simply involve assistant director Guy Hamilton - later the director of Goldfinger and Live And Let Die - acting as a body double).

The film ends with a climactic chase through the sewers of Vienna, but Welles had no interest in spending time in the real city sewers. A replica was constructed at Shepperton Studios in London for Welles to run through, leaving Reed and company to shoot the location footage without him.

This means that the sequence's final moments, in which Lime realises he is trapped by a sewer grate with no way forward or back, cut back and forth between Welles in the studio sewer set, reaching up to the grate, and the street on location in the real Vienna where we see the iconic image of Lime's fingers plaintively reaching for a freedom he will never have.

It was Reed himself, though, who got down below the real sewer grate to wiggle those fingers. Many other directors have cameod through just their hands in pick-up shots, but few have got into a sewer to do it, nor have they given us such an enduring image.