It’s always interesting to see a famous film director acting in a movie made by others. I am thinking of John Huston in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), Erich Von Stroheim in Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1937), Victor Sjöström in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1959), and Paul Wegener in Rex Ingram’s The Magician (1926).

Who’s Paul Wegener, you ask? He directed (and acted in) The Golem: How He Came Into the World (1920), which was a surprisingly good film considering its early production date.

Here’s Paul Wegener as the Golem, a monster created by a rabbi to protect the Jewish residents of Prague from oppression. He actually directed two other films about the Golem going back to 1915, but those films have been lost.

In The Magician, Wegener plays the magician Oliver Haddo, who is obsessed in hypnotizing Margaret Dauncey (played by Alice Terry, Rex Ingram’s wife) and creating life by killing her and taking the blood directly from her heart. Fortunately, her fiancé and guardian arrive at Haddo’s mad doctor’s castle and put the kibosh on him.

Rex Ingram made a number of classic silent films. The most famous is The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), which catapulted Rudolph Valentino to stardom. After sparring with studio bosses, he repaired to Southern France with his wife Alice Terry and made a number of beautiful films such as Mare Nostrum and The Magician, both filmed in 1926.

He is not to be confused with the black actor known by the same name.