“It’s very easy, you know, to buy a light meter, but there’s one thing that meter will not tell you, and that’s whether you have the right mood or not. That you’ll have to decide for yourself.”
James Wong Howe was born just shortly after moviemaking itself was. Few cinematographers did more to illustrate how the burgeoning art form could suggest mood and tone better than the man the industry nicknamed “Low-Key Howe” because of his brilliant use of low-light photography.
Born in 1899 in China under the name Wong Tung Jim, Howe moved with his family to a small town in Washington five years later. As a teenager, he wanted to pursue aviation, but instead he found himself working for director Cecil B. DeMille in Los Angeles, first as the kid who kept the camera department clean and then as the on-set clapper. Soon, he was a director of photography on silent films, but when motion pictures evolved to embrace sound, Howe, like many other technicians of the time, had to prove he could adapt to the new technology. He did just that, developing the use of deep-focus photography for the 1931 comedy Transatlantic, a full ten years before Gregg Toland brought the technique to its apex with Citizen Kane.
But Howe’s innovations didn’t end there. For director Robert Rossen’s shattering 1947 boxing drama Body and Soul, Howe shot the fight scenes with a handheld camera while wearing roller skates, which gave the boxing matches a fluid, intimate urgency that had previously never seemed possible, inspiring director Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980). His expertise with black-and-white photography continued with 1957’s Sweet Smell of Success, which made the world of New York City nightlife seem as sexy and dangerous as anything seen in film noir.
Not that Howe wasn’t equally adept with color: indeed, his Technicolor work on the 1955 romantic drama Picnic is as ravishing as the passion between the film’s lovers, played by William Holden and Kim Novak. But Howe didn’t believe color was automatically superior. “Color is very lavish, and I think if you find the right subject for it and put the people in there, it can be very good,” he said in 1973. “But I don’t think it’s good to use color for color’s sake. I think many color films should actually be made in black and white.”
Nominated for ten Oscars and winning two, for 1955’s The Rose Tattoo and 1963’s Hud, Howe became renowned for using very little light to shoot his pictures. He credited his approach, in part, to coming of age as a cinematographer in an era when light meters weren’t readily available. “We had to judge the exposure by looking through the camera,” he explained, “either through the ground glass or sometimes through a piece of film.” The unexpected benefit, he explained, was that “you can learn exposure if you observe light, which is the most important thing in photography.” For Howe, mood was crucial. “It’s very easy, you know, to buy a light meter,” he said. “But there’s one thing that meter will not tell you, and that’s whether you have the right mood or not. That you’ll have to decide for yourself.”
Above and beyond his cinematic achievements, Howe was also one of the first minorities to make an impact in the American film industry, even more remarkable considering that animosity toward Asians during World War II was so high that Japanese-Americans were being put into internment camps. And yet none of the bigotry surrounding Howe kept him from capturing the majesty of the world in his photography. After his death in 1976, his wife Sanora summed up his legacy as well as anyone ever has. “My husband loved his work,” she wrote. “He was critical of poor quality in any area of film, but quick to see and appreciate the good. If the story allowed, his style was poetic realism, for he was a poet of the camera. This was a part of his nature, his impulse toward the beautiful, but it did not prevent his flexibility in dealing with all aspects of reality.”
01 James Wong Howe
02 Sweet Smell of Success
03 Body and Soul
04 Hud
05 On the set of The Prisoner of Zenda
