James Wong Howe

James Wong Howe: The Man They Called Low-Key

The legend of how a slate boy became a cinematographer turns on a piece of black velvet. Mary Miles Minter's pale blue eyes photographed almost white on the orthochromatic stock of the early 1920s, which ruined her in close-up. A young Chinese-born camera assistant rigged a frame of black velvet in front of the lens so that her pupils would read dark, showed her the result, and was informed that she would not be shot by anyone else. It is the perfect origin story for James Wong Howe, because it contains everything he would spend the next fifty years doing: solving a lighting problem nobody else had solved, cheaply, with his own hands, and getting an effect out of shadow rather than out of more light.

Taishan to Pasco

He was born Wong Tung Jim in Taishan, Guangdong, on 28 August 1899, and came to the United States at five, growing up in Pasco, Washington — a railway town in the eastern part of the state, about as far from the film business as a Chinese immigrant child could be. He boxed for a while, briefly and unremarkably, before turning up in Hollywood in 1917 as a slate boy for Cecil B. DeMille. Almost everything about his subsequent career was self-taught on set.

Deep Focus, Ten Years Early

The technical record is startling for its dates. Howe was working with a crab dolly in 1927. He shot *Transatlantic* in 1931 in deep focus — foreground and background both sharp — roughly a decade before *Citizen Kane* made the technique famous. He used wide-angle lenses when the industry preferred flattering long ones, and he built his images out of low-key light and hard shadow so consistently that the crews nicknamed him Low-Key Howe.

What separated him from his peers was as much labour practice as aesthetics. Howe operated the camera himself and did his own gaffing, which is to say he personally placed the lights rather than describing them to someone else, and he was correspondingly unimpressed by camera flourish for its own sake. "I like to move the people around rather than the camera," he said — a remark that sounds modest and is in fact a whole theory of staging. Late in life he argued explicitly for simplicity over technique that announced itself.

Roller Skates in the Ring

When he did move, he moved in ways that irritated the unions. For the fight sequences of *Body and Soul* (1947) he put on roller skates and had himself pushed around the ring with a hand-held camera, producing a floating, punch-drunk intimacy that no tripod could have delivered. He mounted cameras on bulls. He worked over a career of more than 130 films and repeatedly forced the studios' rulebooks to accommodate an image he had already decided on.

Two Oscars, and the Refusal of Glamour

His first Academy Award came for *The Rose Tattoo* (1955), and he won it by declining to do the one thing a Hollywood cameraman was hired for. Rather than smooth Anna Magnani into conventional star lighting, he lit her as the character actually was; the director Daniel Mann said he "showed Magnani in the true light of her character," bringing in a sensuous backlight only when her desire reawakened. Two years later, on *Sweet Smell of Success* (1957), he gave Burt Lancaster's predatory columnist a single diffuse source that produced what has been described as an owl look — nocturnal, watchful, controlling — and made the film's Manhattan night a moral condition rather than a location.

His second Oscar came for *Hud* (1963) and was won by subtraction. The picture is a masterpiece of stripped-down black-and-white realism, and its most quoted passage is a night scene lit with almost nothing: light bouncing off water, the spill from a porch, character revealed by illumination alone. He was capable of the opposite extreme too. *Seconds* (1966), his most experimental work, deploys distorted close-ups and fish-eye lenses as a visual argument about a dissolving identity — proof that the restraint was a choice, not a limit.

The Country That Would Not Have Him

All of this was accomplished by a man whom the United States legally refused to accept. Under the Chinese Exclusion Act, Howe could not become an American citizen until 1943, when the act was repealed — by which time he had been shooting Hollywood features for two decades. In 1937 he married the novelist Sanora Babb; California's anti-miscegenation laws meant the marriage was not legally recognised in the state until 1948. During the McCarthy period he was graylisted over alleged communist sympathies, another interruption to a career the industry could not really do without.

Why James Is Called a Genius

The claim here is craft, and it is unusually well founded, because cinematography is one of the few crafts where a single person's authorship is measurable frame by frame. Howe's specific quality was inventive problem-solving under constraint — not a taste for beautiful images, which is common, but the engineer's instinct for how to physically obtain one. Black velvet to darken an eye. Roller skates to get inside a fight. A crab dolly in 1927 and deep focus in 1931, both years before the industry caught up. And an unusual willingness to subtract: his signature was low-key light, meaning he made pictures by deciding what would remain dark, which is far harder to control on film stock than simply adding illumination. Because he operated and gaffed himself, the image on screen is his hand and no one else's.

The honest qualification is that a cinematographer is never the author of a film. Howe served directors, and his best-known work — *Hud*, *Sweet Smell of Success*, *The Rose Tattoo* — is inseparable from their scripts and performances; he shot a great many undistinguished pictures among the 130-plus, as any contract craftsman must. Nor was he a theorist: his stated philosophy amounted to move the actors, not the camera, and keep it simple. But within his trade the peer verdict is not ambiguous. The International Cinematographers Guild placed him among the ten most influential cinematographers in the history of the medium, and ten Academy nominations across four decades is a record of sustained judgement rather than a lucky streak.

Legacy

He taught at the UCLA film school in the mid-1960s, where his students included John Alonzo, who would go on to shoot *Chinatown* — a direct line from Howe's hard shadows into the New Hollywood. The Association of Asian Pacific American Artists established the James Wong Howe Award in his name. He died on 12 July 1976, having spent a career being denied citizenship, denied a legal marriage, and briefly denied work by his own industry, while quietly teaching that industry how to light a face. The nickname was meant as shop-floor shorthand. It reads now as a summary of the whole method: Low-Key Howe, the man who understood that the picture is made in the dark parts.

Achievements

• Academy Award for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White — 1964
• Worked as film director, cinematographer and camera operator