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We'll give Danny Huston credit for one thing above all: he always looks like he's having a good time. Or, at the very least, as though he's trying to look like he's having a good time. He has a huge, wide grin -- like The Joker's, but without the prosthetics. We can't imagine where in his DNA that kind of beaming, nearly maniacal joie de vivre resides, but since his dour half-sister Anjelica Huston didn't get it, we can be pretty sure it came from his mother's side.

We'll give him credit for other things, too. For instance, the way he gives the impression of suddenly being everywhere we look, even though -- like Robert Wuhl before him -- he actually hasn't worked all that much yet, and probably has about a quarter the entries on his CV of a seasoned H!ITG! of a comparabale age like, say, Brad Dourif. Huston started in the family business relatively late -- he was already thirty-three when he played "Barman 2" in Leaving Las Vegas -- and since then has shown up in only sixteen movies and one notable TV guest-starring role. Even so, he's made it onto our radar as a H!ITG!. Maybe it's that crazy-ass smile of his that has made him so memorable to us, since it's impossible to watch him without thinking he's smiling so hard that he's about to blow a blood vessel.

It's exactly that huge smile that makes Huston's characters see so untrustworthy -- which they usually aren't, anyway, so that's handy. He was so unctuous as a casino manager in last year's C.S.I. episode "Suckers" that we felt fairly certain, the whole time, that he'd turn out to be involved with the theft of Japanese antiquities from his hotel's vault. And then he was, which meant that either it was a bad performance on his part, telegraphing his guilt, or that it was bad casting to make Danny Huston seem, even briefly, like he was on the up and up. Similarly, Sandy Woodrow -- a diplomat in The Constant Gardener, currently in cinemas -- mmight pass as an upstanding member of the British Foreign Service if he were played by anyone other than Danny Huston. (And...okay, Danny Trejo might be just as bad.)

We have so unshakeably identified Danny Huston with shady ulterior motives, in fact, that even when he's playing a good guy, we suspect him. Though he played the beloved husband Michael to Naomi Watts's Cristina in 21 Grams, the way her character was so devastated by his death in a car accident and the movie's elliptical timeline made us think there was a reveal coming in which we'd learn that he was actually cheating on her or messing with their children, so that all her grief would be tragically ironic. And though we didn't see Birth, we assumed that the reason his character's fiancée, Nicole Kidman's Anna, could become so fixated on a ten-year-old child as his romantic rival that there must be something wrong with Huston's Joseph. Something bigger than an insufficiency of playfulness or childlike innocence, or even a too-heavy covering of body hair.

We will grant that there was probably nothing untoward in the character of Jack Frye, the historical figure (TWA president, specifically) Huston played in The Aviator. But that guy's nickname, in real life? "Smilin' Jack." Clearly, no one was more qualified for the role.