James Wong Howe’s Way with Light

James Wong Howe was a fighter, and he learned how to be one over the course of a turbulent upbringing. Born Wong Tung Jim in 1899, in the Chinese province of Guangdong, the man who would become one of the most revered cinematographers in film history was separated from his mother early on: she fell into a coma while giving birth to him and was presumed dead for several days, and though she eventually awoke, Wong Howe’s father ended up relocating to Pasco, Washington, soon after, with their infant son and a new wife. The child yearned for China and the mother he never knew, but in the face of the cruel, sometimes violent bullying of his classmates in the United States, his desire to assimilate proved stronger than his heritage, which his father tried to reinforce by making him wear traditional Chinese clothing and a long queue that fell down his back. In adulthood Wong Howe recalled, “I wanted to get away from the Chinese thing. Other than my looks, I was purely American.” No matter how he tried, though, he wasn’t perceived that way. His name, a mash-up of Chinese and anglicized elements assigned to him by a schoolteacher, was a lifelong reminder of his foreign-born status.

Wong Howe traveled a circuitous route to his vocation. After the death of his father in 1914, he fled his abusive stepmother and the bigoted community in Pasco to seek his fortunes in Oregon, settling for a time in Portland, where he found minor fame as a local prizefighter. Then he moved to California with dreams of becoming an aviator, only to discover that the Chinese people there were limited to working in menial jobs as restaurant workers, launderers, and delivery boys. It was during a stint at a photography studio that Wong Howe taught himself the basics of the camera and various film stocks. This expertise came in handy when he happened upon a shoot for a Mack Sennett movie in Los Angeles’s Chinatown. One of Sennett’s crew members—a man Wong Howe had once boxed with—advised him to seek out Alvin Wyckoff, who had served as the cinematographer on dozens of Cecil B. DeMille’s pictures and was the head of the camera department at Lasky Studios. Wong Howe arrived at Lasky hoping to land a gig, and when he was denied entry by a puzzled guard, he scaled a fence and talked himself into a job carrying camera equipment. From this humble beginning in 1917, he went on to become one of the most celebrated and best-paid cinematographers in Hollywood.

Like many Asian Americans, Wong Howe was estranged from his parents’ culture and discriminated against at home. Perhaps because of this, he had a deep desire to express himself and was indefatigable in his pursuit of the skills needed to do that. In his spare time, he bought a manual coffee grinder to practice what it would be like to crank a camera should he get the opportunity to call the shots behind one. His chance came in 1919 when, on the set of DeMille’s silent film Male and Female, he was asked to fill a vacancy for fourth-assistant cameraman on a complicated scene in which Gloria Swanson is mauled by a lion. DeMille took a liking to Wong Howe because of his appearance—short and muscular, with a giant cigar clenched determinedly between his teeth. Their relationship was cemented when, after the director’s crew had spent hours trying to capture a canary singing, Wong Howe came up with the idea of inserting a piece of gum into its beak, causing it to open and close its mouth to get the gum unstuck—enough to make the bird look like it was vocalizing.

Wong Howe was known for this kind of quick thinking and problem-solving. He was determined to get the shot no matter how impossible it might seem and, in many cases, to shoot with natural light regardless of the circumstances. The first film he made as a director of photography was Charles Maigne’s Drums of Fate (1923), a project that came to him as a result of his increasingly well-known ingenuity. The film’s star, Mary Miles Minter, asked for Wong Howe because of the way he had photographed her in a series of portraits. Because of the limitations of film stock at the time, the pale blueness of Minter’s eyes registered poorly in black and white. Wong Howe devised a method to darken them by shooting her through a hole he’d cut in a wooden frame with a piece of black velvet stretched over it, which allowed Minter’s eyes to reflect the blackness of the fabric. He won the trust of actors—including major stars like Marlene Dietrich, Kim Novak, and Hedy Lamarr—because he knew how to capture their best features, and he earned a lot of his work this way.

For all of Wong Howe’s early triumphs, this period was also beset with disruptions. After a year back in China (during which he shot footage he hoped could be included in his own directorial debut), he returned to Hollywood in 1929 and found himself unemployable, because no one wanted a cameraman who didn’t have any experience shooting in sound. Howard Hawks, an old friend who had started at Lasky the same day he did, hired Wong Howe for The Criminal Code (1931). But according to some accounts, the predominantly white crew resented taking orders from an Asian man, and their racist bullying started the first day on set. True to his nature, Wong Howe fought back, and Hawks ended up firing him and the rest of the crew.

Wong Howe shied away from talking about the racism he faced, even though it left a mark on his professional and personal life. The Chinese Exclusion Act prevented him from becoming an American citizen until it was repealed in 1943. Anti-miscegenation laws meant that his marriage to his wife, the author Sanora Babb, in Paris in 1937, was not recognized in California until 1949. During the war, he wore a large “I Am Chinese” button to deflect some of the anti-Japanese bigotry leveled at him. (His dear friend James Cagney wore an identical button in solidarity.) Along with these indignities, though, he was experiencing the most fertile period of his career, shooting over sixty films in the period between 1930 and 1950. Over the course of what would end up being a fifty-seven-year career—one that stretched from the silent era into the 1970s—Wong Howe was one of the rare Asian Americans to be held in high esteem in a jealous, homogenous Tinseltown.

His gift for making memorable images of movie stars’ faces carried into the rest of his career, and it’s particularly evident in scenes of romance. In the swashbuckling period piece Fire over England (1937), a movie for which the British producer Alexander Korda poached him, Wong Howe handles a conspiratorial exchange between Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh (in their first on-screen collaboration) with a sharp attention to nuances of light. The two actors are breathless, their faces inches apart, as light refracts like exploding fireworks off a gaudy ring on Leigh’s hand. Wong Howe’s ability to tease detail out of low-light environments earned him the nickname Low-Key Howe, an affectionate phrase whose Chinese-mimicking monosyllables nevertheless could be heard as containing a hint of mockery.

Wong Howe was adept at creating delicate, small-scaled moments like these, but he could also find intimacy in epic productions with enormous casts—a skill he likely learned while working with Victor Fleming on The Rough Riders (1927). In it, Wong Howe was tasked with shooting 600 military personnel from the U.S. Army’s Second Division stationed in Corpus Christi, 250 African American extras, and 350 Spanish and Cuban locals portraying Theodore Roosevelt’s soldiers and their antagonists in various conflicts around the world. Decades later, Francis Ford Coppola offered Wong Howe the first two Godfather films, though he had to decline because of his failing health. The cinematographer’s last film, Funny Lady (1975), was assigned to him a couple of weeks after shooting had begun, when Vilmos Zsigmond found himself overwhelmed by the intricate choreography and the large number of actors.

Wong Howe wasn’t just a master of eye-catching images; he was also brilliant at suggesting subtext and heightening narrative climaxes. Consider the sequence in Sam Wood’s Kings Row (1942) in which Drake McHugh (Ronald Reagan) goofs around at his local bank, pretending to be a banker in an empty office to make his girlfriend (Ann Sheridan) laugh while the actual bank officials huddle in the foreground behind a curved, fishbowl-like glass partition. They’re panicked because they know what Drake doesn’t: that his trust fund has been pillaged. The way Wong Howe sets up the scene, with the subtle distortion of the glass magnifying the characters’ furrowed brows, tells us everything we need to know about how his fortunes are about to change. As the bankers, who are seen through dark bars that convey their tenuous legal situation, rush to check for the money in a safety deposit box, Wong Howe shoots the box’s opening as though it were the yawning mouth of a bottomless mine. With few light sources, he evokes the emotions of the characters as they’re sharing a dangerous secret. It’s work like this that made Wong Howe a director’s ideal partner, steadfastly devoted to the process of telling a story.

There was a perfectionist streak in him, and also an innovator’s restlessness. He put on roller skates to achieve the fluid camera movements in the fight sequences of Body and Soul (1947); he stuck a camera on a bull’s head mounted on a bicycle in The Brave Bulls (1951) to simulate the gaze of an animal bearing down on a down-on-his-luck bullfighter played by Anthony Quinn. Against union regulations, Wong Howe did much of his own gaffing, interfered with wardrobe and makeup, and often operated the camera himself. Even as he delighted in tricks, he was judicious in their use, and usually preferred simplicity and stillness. He once said, “I like to move the people around rather than the camera. When we rehearse, the scripted action should more or less dictate.” In Michael Curtiz’s Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), for instance, the climactic musical number is filmed with minimal camera movement. It’s the star, Cagney, who moves—from the front of a stage to the back of it, until his feet are visible. Cagney didn’t need a frenetic camera to match his energy; he just needed someone to chronicle his genius straight-on.

Wong Howe’s best-known work may be a handful of films made in the 1950s, the decade he landed on the Hollywood “gray list,” after his name came up in a testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He won the first of his two Oscars for Daniel Mann’s adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play The Rose Tattoo (1955), in which Anna Magnani stars as a widow-turned-recluse confronted with new information about her late husband. Wong Howe allows her to look flattened by grief. He “paid no attention to any conventions of glamour and false lighting,” said Mann, and he “showed Magnani in the true light of her character.” When the character meets a prospective beau (Burt Lancaster) who reawakens her sexual desires, Wong Howe envelops her in a sensuous atmosphere, with highlights in her hair and backlights accentuating her excitement. In the sequence where Lancaster is getting a rose tattooed on his chest to express his love for Magnani, Wong Howe lights him from a single, diffuse source to soften his features, capturing the spirit of a character who would so impulsively try to prove his affections for a woman who hasn’t made up her mind about him.

Two years later, Wong Howe reunited with Lancaster on Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success, and the difference in how he chose to light the star here demonstrates Wong Howe’s genius. He later recalled:

[Sweet Smell of Success] takes place almost entirely at night with a dark mood throughout, and Lancaster was a powerful man who wanted to control everyone around him. Even in restaurants and other interiors with a lot of fill light, Lancaster was lit so that his chiseled features stood out and his steel-rimmed eyeglasses gave him a sort of owl look, like a bird that hunts at night.

James Wong Howe’s Way with Light

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