“Some families are generations of carpenters or farmers, or they make clothes, or they’re all lawyers,” the actor and sometime director Danny Huston observed not so long ago. “I’m in the family business.” Between his grandfather (the actor Walter Huston), his father (the fabled writer, director, and actor John Huston), and his half-siblings (Angelica and Tony), Danny Huston’s family has been in the movie business for more than 75 years. On the occasion of John Huston’s centenary, the Museum of Modern Art’s film department today begins a retrospective of 42 films highlighting three generations of the family business — “The Huston Family: 75 Years on Film.”

Born in 1884, Walter Huston trod the boards in Vaudeville and on Broadway before making his movie debut in 1929. He was lean and graceful with a broad smile, soulful eyes, and a terrifically expressive voice; the talkies were made for him. Like many successful stage actors of his generation, Walter Huston went west for the sake of his bank account, not his art. But half a decade in the movie business made the former engineer re-tool his technique. “I was certainly a better actor after my five years in Hollywood,” Huston confessed years later. “I had learned to be natural — never to exaggerate — using my ordinary voice, eliminating gestures, keeping everything extremely simple.”

Mary Astor, Walter Huston’s co-star in William Wyler’s paradigmatic 1930’s stage adaptation “Dodsworth” (9/1), described Huston as “a warm, easygoing human being.” As Sinclair Lewis’s sentimental industrialist Sam Dodsworth (a role he originated on Broadway) Walter Huston harnessed that warmth and ease with perfection. “I’m paid to make bad lines sound good,” he once explained. In “Dodsworth,” his direct, honest simplicity made good lines sound great.

Walter passed down his flair for simplicity along with the eyes, the voice, and the grin to his son John Huston. John began his Hollywood career as a writer, netting his first gigs on his father’s say-so. But he came to the movies with considerable prior experience as a painter and a stage actor and director. The project he chose for his directorial debut was the third filmed version of Dashiell Hammet’s “The Maltese Falcon” (8/24, 9/1). But Huston pitched his film to studio boss Jack Warner as a faithful adaptation of the novel, rather than a mere remake. From the start, John Huston, his cast (including his dad, uncredited and unrecognizable as a sailor who drops dead with “the bird” in his hands), and his crew knew that they were on to something. “We had a sneaky feeling we were doing something different and exciting,” Astor remembered of the energy on the “Falcon” set.

Detective fiction was a dubious literary genre then and detective movies weren’t selling tickets like they had been. The studio was doubtful that Huston’s debut would do anything but land its director back behind his typewriter. Even after an overwhelmingly successful preview screening, Warner’s PR brain trust wanted to change the film’s title to “The Gent From Frisco.” But “The Maltese Falcon” was a hit. Its literary origins and its small cast of idiosyncratic characters forced to do verbal battle with the law and each other in uncomfortably close physical circumstances became the model for Huston’s subsequent pictures.

Several John Huston films remain unchallenged masterpieces of Hollywood filmmaking. “The Asphalt Jungle” (9/6) is the definitive American caper picture. Despite “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”‘s (8/18, 9/4) calm and relatively un-self-conscious execution, extravagant cinema stylists Sam Peckinpah and P.T. Anderson each have cited it as a favorite. 1952’s “Moulin Rouge” (9/4, 9/20), a brilliantly stylized color experiment undertaken with cinematographer Oswald Morris, puts the better known, ADA-afflicted Baz Lurman namesake of 2001 to shame.

The MoMA program also contains some of the Hustons’ least seen and least appreciated pictures. “Freud,” (8/28, 9/8) “Reflections in a Golden Eye” (9/8, 9/20), and “The Kremlin Letter” (8/27, 9/11) boast courageously oddball performances from Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, and George Sanders, respectively. John Huston’s own acting work also gets its due in the retrospective. His turn as Noah Cross — smacking his lips as he grabs at an opportunity to continue a cycle of family depravity in the climax of Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” (9/1, 9/18) — is like a Bosch grotesque transplanted to 1940s Los Angeles.

John’s daughter Angelica and son Danny have both tried their hand at directing, each following in their father’s creative footsteps by choosing literary adaptations. Angelica also shares a unique distinction with her grandfather. Both she and Walter received acting Oscars in films directed by John (“Prizzi’s Honor” playing 8/19 and 9/3 and “Sierra Madre,” respectively). Though in his 40s, Danny Huston is just now coming into his own as an actor. Like his sister, he is often one of the most memorable things about the films he’s in. In Martin Scorcese’s “The Aviator,” Danny was part of a chorus of secondary characters barraging Leonardo Di Caprio’s Howard Hughes with obligatory biopic plot-driving questions. Yet Danny’s Jack Frye alone seemed to actually listen to Hughes’s answers and wonder at their meaning. To me his character’s evident unease and jealousy were the only vital heat thawing the moribund stylistic deep-freeze of “Birth.” In “The Proposition” (9/21) his Huston-brand dignity and equipoise transformed Nick Cave’s sub-Cormack McCarthy dialogue and director John Hillcoat’s mud-and-rags 1970s Western retro shtick into something organic and human.

Danny Huston continues the family business of picture-making by selling insurance. With his father’s and grandfather’s uvular burr and gentle-eyed, lens romancing eyes, he’s insuring that no matter what shape contemporary American movies may be in, the Huston family’s seven-plus decades of contributions will remain alive on the screen.

Through September 21 (Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53 St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).