Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,674

This is the grave of James Wong Howe.

Born in Taishan, Canton Province, China in 1899, Wong Tung Jim grew up mostly in the United States. Shortly after his birth, his father got into the United States and got a job on the Northern Pacific Railroad. I assume he went to Canada or Mexico first since the Chinese Exclusion Act was in effect at this time, but Chinese people crossed over the border all the time, leading to the creation of the Border Patrol. In any case, the rest of the family came over in 1904 and lived in Pasco, Washington. His father ran a store for the Chinese community there. The Howe is his name came from a teacher, who “gave” the kid his own name as part of an Americanization thing. How kind….

At some point when Howe was still a kid, his father died. He moved to Oregon for awhile with an uncle who lived there. He boxed some and considered a professional career at it as a bantamweight, but he wasn’t really good enough for that. He ended up drifting down to San Francisco and soon was down in Los Angeles. He was walking around one day and saw an old friend of his from the boxing days. The guy was helping Mack Sennett shoot a film on the streets of LA. Howe thought that looked fun and so he started asking around for jobs making movies. He got some low-level job and was working one day when Cecil B. DeMille needed an extra clapper boy for The Little American, his 1917 film with Mary Pickford about a woman in love with both a German and a French soldier at the same time. Sounds very melodramatic. Anyway, Howe was smoking a cigar while doing this. Now, DeMille thought it was hilarious to see a tiny little Chinese guy with a huge cigar in his mouth, so he kept the kid on and made him a camera assistant.

Howe rose very quickly in the cinematography world. He discovered he could make an actress’ eyes look darker if he filmed her looking at a dark surface. Directors were like, hey, that’s a great new technique! And of course the story of the silents is the rapid progression of all this new technology. But the talkies came pretty quickly and they were filmed differently and Howe had to reestablish himself. It took a little time, but after Howard Hawks hired him to shoot The Criminal Code, he was back in the saddle.

Howe became perhaps the greatest cinematographer in film history. He soon started picking up Academy Award nominations. The first was for Algiers in 1938. Then he was nominated for Abe Lincoln in Illinois in 1940, Kings Row in 1942, and both The North Star and Air Force in 1943. He didn’t win in this era though. Not that a cinematography is the determinant factor on the quality of a film (though of course the cinematographer matters a lot on that question), but not many of the films he shot in this period are considered real classics today.

All of this made Howe a huge diva. A tiny man who faced a lot of racism, he would fight back by yelling and screaming at everyone, including famous directors. It was his damn film. Among the racism he faced was the Chinese Exclusion Act, which meant he could not become a citizen. Also, after he married the novelist Sanora Babb in Paris in 1937, California would not recognize the marriage due to its anti-miscegenation laws. It was not until 1948, when a judge finally did it and he famously said about it “She looks old enough. If she wants to marry a chink, that’s her business.” She doesn’t seem to be buried here and she lived much longer than he did, dying in 2005, so I don’t know if she is just unmarked or what.

Howe ran into problems with the blacklist. He was not a communist, but he was close and Babb had been a party member. They moved to Mexico for awhile to escape the pressure in the late 40s and the only major work he did for a few years was Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. It was Sam Fuller, disgusted by all of this blacklisting, who brought him back in 1950 to shoot The Baron of Arizona, which I should note is a fantastic film.

This really led to Howe’s peak period. One of the pioneers of deep-focus cinematography, he became the go-to cinematographer of the 1950s and for most of the rest of his life. He finally won Best Cinematographer for 1955’s The Rose Tattoo and then again for 1963’s Hud, which is a film where I really love Howe’s work. He received three additional Oscar nominations as well, for The Old Man and the Sea, from 1958, Seconds, from 1966, and Funny Lady, from 1975. Among the other films he worked on in his peak was The Sweet Smell of Success in 1957 and The Molly Maguires in 1970. I wish the latter was a better film, but despite the best efforts of Howe, Sean Connery, and others, it’s pretty meh. He did some nifty tricks too. For the filming of Body and Soul, a 1947 film with John Garfield, he got on roller skates during the fight scene in order to capture the boxers in motion. The idea of holding a camera and filming on roller skates seems….challenging!

Howe also had ambitions to direct his own films. Usually these projects didn’t work out. But he did direct Invisible Avenger, a noir, and Go Man Go, a movie about the Harlem Globetrotters. Neither film is supposed to be any good, but I haven’t seen them. He also directed some TV from time to time. In his spare time, Howe did a lot of teaching at UCLA, helping to train a new generation of cinematographers.

While filming Funny Lady, in 1974, Howe collapsed on set. He had been in pretty bad health since he finished The Molly Maguires and this was his first film since then. I am not sure exactly what did him in. His New York Times obituary just says “a long illness” and that’s about as specific as I’ve seen. In any case, he died in 1976. He was 76 years old.

James Wong Howe is buried in Westwood Village Memorial Park, Los Angeles, California.

If you would like this series to visit other Academy Award winning cinematographers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. George Barnes, who won for Rebecca in 1940, is also in Los Angeles. So is Arthur C. Miller, who won in 1941 for How Green Was My Valley in 1941, The Song of Bernadette in 1944, and Anna and the King of Siam in 1947. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.