The opening credit sequence is now a kind of lost cinematic art. But there was a time when this overture, designed to ease viewers into a film’s world and tone, was ubiquitous. And even then, the first minutes of Alexander Mackendrick’s 1957 masterpiece Sweet Smell of Success pulsed with a rare energy and artistry.
An overhead shot of Times Square at dusk; followed by workers hurriedly loading delivery trucks with the evening edition of the New York Globe; then a montage of one truck snaking its way through the theater district, now illuminated by countless marquees and advertisements, until a guy on the truck tosses a bundle of papers out to a newsstand in front of a hot dog joint, where reptilian press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) anxiously grasps for a copy. The sequence, set to Elmer Bernstein’s indelible “crime jazz” score, is postwar Broadway seen from the streets, gorgeous, sexy, and slightly-menacing, its dazzling black-and-white images an homage to Weegee and anticipation of the French New Wave in equal measure.
Nearly 70 years later, the first minutes of Success are more time machine than time capsule, propelling us back to one of the most evocative moments in New York City. It’s a testament to Mackendrick’s willingness to be daring — Hollywood didn’t make movies this way, with such grit and unpredictable verisimilitude. But the real master at work is James Wong Howe.
By Success, Wong Howe had been a cinematographer for more than three decades and had a well earned reputation for creative lighting and technical ingenuity. Both talents are on wild display in the film. In one shot during the opening, we’re on the back of the truck, the delivery guy silhouetted against the incandescent hubbub behind him, as Howe uses the vehicle as a dolly to capture silky smooth documentary-style footage of the urban scene gliding by. Elsewhere, “I used varnish to give the look of the film a glitter, in the bars, many of them real in New York,” Wong Howe said in 1963. “I used very small bulbs; photoflood effects worked well because we had so much polish on the walls it made everything shine. The whole film shimmered.”
“I enjoy odd results,” he added. “Off-beat things, unpredictable things. I believe they increase realism. And realism comes first with me, always.”
That dynamic tension between artist and technician is at the heart of Howe’s 50-plus-year career, which gets a long overdue reconsideration — or, perhaps, rediscovery — at the Museum of the Moving Image, in Astoria, this month. The 19-film series “How It’s Done: The Cinema of James Wong Howe” opens May 13 and surveys the cinematographer’s vast filmography, from silent films (Peter Pan, Mantrap) to groundbreaking early talkies (Transatlantic, The Power and the Glory) to mainstream classics (Hud, Seconds). It’s a celebration of an oft-overlooked cinematic genius and a Hollywood pioneer, both behind the camera and in the industry.
[pullquote]Nearly 70 years later, the first minutes of Success are more time machine than time capsule,[/pullquote]
“James Wong Howe was always widely respected in his time, but I don’t know that he’s had his due in this era, when we’re actually paying attention to people of color, who are the great artists of the last century in terms of Hollywood,” Eric Hynes, the museum’s curator of film, tells the Star-Revue. “He’s definitely not a household name when it comes to the greater public.”
James Wong Howe was born Wong Tung Jim on August 28, 1899, in Guangdong, China. (A teacher anglicized his name to James Wong Howe.) His family immigrated to Pasco, Washington, when he was five, and for his first 25 years he believed he was a Pasco native. (He learned the truth of his origins during an interview with a federal official in 1924 required by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1884 for anyone of Chinese ancestry who tried to leave and re-enter the U.S. to work.) When he was 12 or 13, he bought his first camera, a Brownie, from a local drugstore and began taking photos of his family. After his father’s death in 1914, Wong Howe moved in with an Irish family in Oregon before living with his uncle. He trained as a boxer, “fought around a while,” he said in 1963, then, after a stint in San Francisco, arrived in Los Angeles.
While watching a Mack Sennett comedy being shot in Chinatown, Wong Howe met the film’s cinematographer who encouraged him to get into the movies. It took a few months, but he did just that. He “dropped by” Lasky/Famous Players, where the 5’2” Wong Howe was told he was too small to carry film equipment. So he was hired to pick up nitrate stock scraps from the editing room. He graduated to slate boy, enthusiastically operating the clapboard before a take, eventually catching Cecil B. DeMille’s eye. The director made him a fourth assistant to his cameraman.
But Wong Howe’s real break was actress Mary Miles Minter. He met her on set and asked to take her photograph. She agreed, and when she saw the results — using a black velvet sheet around the camera, Wong Howe made it seem like the fair-blue-eyed star had dark eyes, which was better for her screen presence — Minter hired him to be her cinematographer. “After that, I was never out of work,” he said in 1970.
That work put him on sets with generations of Hollywood royalty: Howard Hawks (Air Force), John Frankenheimer (Seconds), Frank Borzage (After Tomorrow), Fritz Lang (Hangmen Also Die!), Busby Berkley (They Made Me a Criminal), and Raoul Walsh (Pursued) behind the camera; Lon Chaney (Laugh, Clown, Laugh), Joan Crawford (Four Walls), William Powell and Myrna Loy (The Thin Man), Laurence Olivier (The Yellow Ticket), Humphrey Bogart (Passage to Marseille), Barbara Stanwyck (My Reputation), Spencer Tracy (The Old Man and the Sea), and Barbra Streisand (Funny Lady) in front of it. “There’s no doubt about the fact that he’s the best cameraman I ever worked with,” Frankenheimer told the Los Angeles Times in 2001.
When Wong Howe died, at 76, in 1976, he had more than 130 credits to his name, working at MGM and Warner Bros. in the 1930s and ’40s before going freelance for the rest of his career. He was nominated for nine Oscars, winning two (for The Rose Tattoo in 1956 and Hud in 1964), among numerous other awards and recognitions. And through his innovative use of wide angles and deep focus, years before Orson Welles and Greg Toland popularized them in Citizen Kane, and outside-the-box solutions to tricky problems — like wearing roller skates and using a hand-held camera to shoot a boxing match in Body and Soul — Wong Howe transformed how films were photographed.
“Once or twice, people would interview him and say you are a real artist. You are a poet of the camera, and he was just kind of embarrassed by it,” Wong Howe’s wife, the novelist Sanora Babb, told the Los Angeles Times in 2001. “But secretly he knew he was a lot more than a technician.”
That attitude is born out in the 19 films chosen for the Museum of the Moving Image series. Hynes says it’s a program the museum had thought about for at least a couple of years. Besides a global pandemic that shut museums, theaters, and distribution services, “How It’s Done” was delayed by Hynes and his colleagues trying to track down films. Wong Howe’s independent directorial effort Go Man Go, a 1954 film about the origins of the Harlem Globetrotters, for example, was one they desperately wanted to include and were able to thanks to a late discovery of a 16mm print loaned by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Others, though, like Wong Howe’s first film, the silent Drums of Fate (1923), is considered lost; The Rough Riders (1927) only exists as a fragment at the Library of Congress.
[pullquote]”Wong Howe transformed how films were photographed”[/pullquote]
What was out there, though, required Hynes and team to make some hard choices. They couldn’t include everything, so the guiding principle became, “What’s the story we’re telling here? And what of his career do we want to represent?” Hynes says. That led to their including silents like Mantrap and Peter Pan, which could run with live accompaniment and overlap with the museum’s Silents, Please! series, as well as benchmarks from across Wong Howe’s career: Prisoner of Zenda, Sweet Smell of Success, Bell, Book and Candle, Hud, Seconds. But left on the cutting room floor were films he made with good friend James Cagney because, as classic as Yankee Doodle Dandy is, it didn’t fit into the series narrative.
“There seems to be a guiding sense that he was not interested in comedies and musicals that much. In terms of visuals, both are flat when it comes to lighting and a bit sort of uninteresting in terms of how he shot,” Hynes says. “But, then again, we’re showing The Thin Man, categorically a comedy, that looks incredible because he’s playing with our expectations and how it’s supposed to be shot. I was drawn to things like that.”
Wong Howe’s films are monuments to creativity and confidence. He may have leaned into his humility, but he knew his choices were right, his “gimmicks” would work, his craftsmanship was rock solid. He stretched the limits of what the camera could do — how a film looked — to set new boundaries, only to break through those, as well.
But his career is also a testament to perseverance. He overcame grinding racism as a child and institutional bigotry as an adult. Wong Howe and Babb, who was white, married in Paris in 1937; because of miscegenation laws, the marriage wasn’t legally recognized in the U.S. until 1949. And cultural stereotypes dogged him his entire life — even in Hollywood, a film colony teeming with striving newcomers, he was labeled “the Chinaman,” according to Haskell Wexler, by crews unaccustomed to people who looked like him. “There’s an element here of his being such a significant artist, and such an anomaly at a time when there are a lot of immigrants working in Hollywood but not a lot of Asian Americans,” Hynes says.
Regardless of what’s included in the series or not, though, “How It’s Done” is a necessary spotlight on an Asian American artist, a da Vinci of Hollywood filmmaking who — save a Google Doodle in 2018 — hasn’t received the attention his life and work deserve.
“If you really care about how cinema is made,” Hynes says, “James Wong Howe is as good as it gets.”
“How It’s Done: The Cinema of James Wong Howe” runs from May 13-June 26 at the Museum of the Moving Image, 26-01 35 Avenue in Astoria. For more information, including the full screening schedule, visit movingimage.us/james-wong-howe.
One Comment
Great piece! Thanks!