For Immediate Release
June 2001
THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART PRESENTS A RETROSPECTIVE OF 31 FEATURE FILMS PHOTOGRAPHED BY ACCLAIMED CINEMATOGRAPHER JAMES WONG HOWE
High Drama, Low Key: The Cinematography of James Wong Howe
August 3–September 4, 2001
The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1
The Museum of Modern Art pays tribute to one of America’s most inventive and influential cinematographers, James Wong Howe (1899–1976), with a 31-film retrospective that spans his six-decade career. Howe made nearly 125 films in Hollywood, his first in 1922 and his last in 1974, and was nominated for ten Oscars, winning in 1955 for Daniel Mann’s The Rose Tattoo and in 1963 for Martin Ritt’s Hud. These and virtually all of the other films in this exhibition, which runs from August 3 through September 4 in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1, will be shown in 35mm. Many of the prints have been newly struck or restored, including William K. Howard’s rarely seen talkie The Power and the Glory (1933), Howard Hawks’s Air Force (1943), Michael Curtiz’s Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), and Raoul Walsh’s Pursued (1947).
James Wong Howe never ceased experimenting with new technologies as cameras, lighting, and film stock became increasingly sophisticated. He was one of the first American cinematographers to use panchromatic film in the mid-1920s, the crab dolly in the late 1920s, infrared film in the 1940s, and miniature quartz lights in the 1960s. In 1931 Howe pioneered the use of true deep focus and ceilinged sets in William K. Howard’s Transatlantic, employing it much less ostentatiously than Gregg Toland would in Citizen Kane ten years later. In this and in other films of the early 1930s, he showed a penchant for naturalistic, low-contrast lighting, which earned him the nickname Low-Key Howe.
"Howe’s considerable artistic and technical gifts made him one of the industry’s most sought-after cameramen," notes the exhibition’s organizer, Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator, Department of Film and Media. "Few cinematographers can be said to have helped define the look of Hollywood pictures from the pioneering silent years all the way through the maverick 1960s and 1970s, but Howe did just that."
Born Wong Tung Jim in Kwantung, China, on August 28, 1899, Howe immigrated with his family to America when he was five, settling in Pasco, Washington. As a teenager he went to Los Angeles with dreams of becoming a professional boxer but turned instead to a career in motion pictures in 1917 by working in the office of Alvin Wyckoff, Cecil B. DeMille’s chief cameraman. Howe became the "slate boy" on DeMille’s Male and Female in 1919, and for the next three years he learned the craft of the camera operator on other DeMille pictures. His big break came when he hit upon the idea of draping his camera with black velvet to make the pale blue eyes of Mary Miles Minter, a popular silent film heroine, "go dark" on the technically tricky orthochromatic film then in use. Howe went on to make silent screen stars like Pola Negri, Clara Bow, and Bessie Love look glamorous and seductive.
Howe’s success led to numerous assignments on romantic adventures, war films, and melodramas, including the 26 pictures he shot for Warner Bros. between 1938 and 1947. Howe was no less innovative in color, as evidenced by his subtle use of Technicolor in Norman Taurog’s The Adventures of Tom Saywer (1937) and his harsh, intense look for John Sturges’s The Old Man and the Sea (1957). His handheld camerawork–while on roller skates for the boxing match in Robert Rossen’s Body and Soul (1947) and in a wheelchair for John Berry’s He Ran All the Way (1951)–became legendary and much-imitated.
Collaborating frequently with Herbert Brenon, Victor Fleming, Howard Hawks, Michael Curtiz, Raoul Walsh and Ritt, Howe brilliantly adapted his style to theirs, and also photographed some of the best work of John Cromwell (The Prisoner of Zenda, 1937, and Algiers, 1938), Sam Wood (Kings Row, 1941), Lewis Milestone (The North Star, 1943), Alexander Mackendrick (Sweet Smell of Success, 1957), and John Frankenheimer (Seconds, 1966).
High Drama, Low Key: The Cinematography of James Wong Howe was organized by Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator, Department of Film and Media. The Department thanks Richard May, Turner Entertainment Co.; Charles Hopkins, David Pendelton, and Rob Stone, UCLA Film and Television Archive; Gary Palmucci and Jessica Rosner, Kino International; John Kirk and Irene Ramos, MGM/UA; Schawn Belston, Twentieth Century Fox; Tim Lanza, The Douris Corporation; Steve Rossen; and Tom Toth for their generous loan of prints [many of which are either newly struck or recently restored] for this exhibition.
High Drama, Low Key: The Cinematography of James Wong Howe
Screening Schedule:
Friday, August 3, 3:30 p.m.; Tuesday, August 14, 6:00 p.m.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
1938. USA. Directed by Norman Taurog. Written by John V.A. Weaver, based on the novel by Mark Twain. Cinematography by James Wong Howe and Wilfred M. Cline. With Tommy Kelly, May Robson, Ann Gillis, Walter Brennan, Margaret Hamilton and Jackie Moran. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is Technicolor at its most delicately muted. Howe had virtually no experience with the fledgling three-strip color process when David O. Selznick hired him in 1937, and during the production he warred constantly with the technical advisers from Technicolor over choices of lighting and palette. But Howe prevailed, tossing out their gaudily colored costumes and sets in favor of warmer earth tones that were more in keeping with Twain’s portrait of antebellum life on the Mississippi. Howe also refused to light the fantastic Menzies-designed cave sequences at their required 800-foot candle levels, which would have lit the place up like a ballroom and destroyed any illusion of two small children lost in the shadows of a vast and gloomy cavern. As biographer Todd Rainsberger notes, Howe so alienated the Technicolor company that they refused to let him shoot another color film until 1949. New 35mm print. 93 min.Friday, August 3, 6:00 p.m.; Saturday, September 1, 2:00 p.m.
Transatlantic.
1931. USA. Directed by William K. Howard. Written by Guy Bolton. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Edited by Jack Murray. Art direction by Gordon Wiles. Music by Carli Elinor. With Edmund Lowe, Myrna Loy, Jean Hersholt, Lois Moran, John Halliday, Greta Nissen, Billy Bevan and Ruth Donnelly. William K. Howard’s mystery drama Transatlantic, a kind of Grand Hotel on the high seas, is among the most technically innovative and influential of Hollywood’s early sound films. Howe’s virtuosic variety of camera techniques included an elaborately choreographed tracking shot of the ocean liner’s bustling departure and true deep focus under low-light conditions, made possible by development of sharper wide-angle lenses, faster and more sensitive black-and-white film stocks, and incandescent lamps. He made the ship seem claustrophobic by insisting that the art director, Gordon Willes, construct ceilings and long, narrow corridors on the sound stages, and created an atmosphere of intrigue with low camera angles and dramatic contrasts of light and shadow. 74 min.Friday, August 3, 8:00 p.m.; Monday, August 6, 6:00 p.m.
The Power and the Glory.
1933. USA. Directed by William K. Howard. Written by Preston Sturges. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Edited by Paul Weatherwax. Sets by Max Parker. With Spencer Tracy, Colleen Moore, Ralph Morgan, Helen Vinson and J. Farrell McDonald. Sturges’s first runaway success was his screenplay for this early sound film, which has been seen as a precursor to Citizen Kane. He employs a densely woven flashback structure to chronicle the rise and tragic downfall of a railroad tycoon, a character inspired by cereal emperor C.W. Post, the grandfather of Sturges’s second wife. James Wong Howe freed the camera from the heavy soundproof boxes that restricted movement in talkies and created lighting appropriate to the film’s shifts of time and mood. He also became a more naturalistic cinematographer, subtler in his use of molding and shadow (for the first time he convinced a lead actor not to wear any makeup), and truer to the source and play of light one would observe in real settings. Print restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. 76 min.Saturday, August 4, 2:30 p.m.; Thursday, August 9, 3:30 p.m.
Peter Pan.
1924. USA. Directed by Herbert Brenon. Written by Willis Goldbeck, based on the play by J.M. Barrie. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Settings by Edward Smith. Special effects by Roy Pomeroy. With Betty Bronson, Ernest Torrence, Mary Brian, Esther Ralston, Cyril Chadwick, Anna May Wong and George Ali. Tinted in sepia for the prosaic day scenes and blue for the nocturnal fantasies, Herbert Brenon’s silent film version of Peter Pan is a magical evocation of J.M. Barrie’s 1904 play about a boy who refuses to grow up. James Wong Howe’s exquisitely ethereal photography, reminiscent of Victorian fairy paintings, makes the sea shimmer and the Forest of Make-Believe shadowy and mysterious. Among his many clever conceits was to give Tinkerbell the breath of life by hanging an automobile headlight from a fishing pole and then to invoke her poignant demise and miraculous resurrection with a dimmer switch. Silent, with piano accompaniment by Ben Model. New tinted 35mm print. 100 min.Saturday, August 4, 5:00 p.m.; Monday, August 6, 3:30 p.m.
The King on Main Street.
1925. USA. Directed by Monta Bell. Written by Douglas Z. Doty and Bell, based on the French play The King by Gaston Arman de Caillavet, Robert de Flers, and Emmanuel Arène. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Sets by Sam Corso. Howe made early use of the dolly shot in Monta Bell’s sophisticated sex comedy The King on Main Street, from 1925, which opens with the camera moving towards the King of Molvania (Menjou) on the throne. A continental Lothario, the King has been sent to the States to rescue his tiny nation from bankruptcy but is sidetracked by the wonders of Coney Island and Times Square and the charms of Bessie Love, an All-American girl from Little Falls. Howe attempted his first subjective shot for the delightful ride on the Cyclone, and for the moonlit tryst he enveloped Menjou and Love in soft diffusion, the kind of glamorizing photography that silent screen stars coveted. Unfortunately, the film’s two-strip Technicolor sequences, representing Howe’s first use of color, are now lost. Silent, with piano accompaniment by Ben Model. App. 70 min.Sunday, August 5, 2:00 p.m.; Tuesday, August 7, 6:00 p.m.
Algiers.
1938. USA. Directed by John Cromwell. Written by John Howard Lawson, based on the novel Pépé le Moko by Detective Ashelbe and the French film of the same name. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Edited by Otho Lovering and William Reynolds. Art direction by Alexander Toluboff. With Sigrid Gurie, Charles Boyer, Hedy Lamarr, Joseph Calleia, Alan Hale, Gene Lockhart, Paul Harvey. Following the success of The Prisoner of Zenda in 1937, Howe was hired by Walter Wanger to photograph John Cromwell’s Algiers, a virtual shot-for-shot remake of Julien Duviver’s popular French thriller Pépé le Moko (1937). Charles Boyer reprises Jean Gabin’s title role as the suave Parisian jewel thief who eludes capture by taking refuge in the Casbah, the safe but constricting Berber quarter of Algiers. Howe received the first of his ten Oscar nominations by making Austrian newcomer Hedy Lamarr look sultry and exotic, and by magically transforming a studio set into the seedily exotic Casbah of our poetic imagination. He used rows of blinding overhead lights to simulate the white heat of North Africa’s midday sun, and burned resin on the studio floor to give off a "dry, atmospheric haze." During the Arabian nights, strangely disorienting shadow patterns and other low-key effects lend an aura of mystery and danger to the labyrinthine corridors, the smoky café, and Pépé’s cramped hideout, which Howe framed tightly and shot in deep focus. 95 min.Sunday, August 5, 5:00 p.m.; Tuesday, August 7, 3:30 p.m.
The Prisoner of Zenda.
1937. USA. Written by John Cromwell (and George Cukor and W.S. Van Dyke, uncredited). Screenplay by John L. Balderston, based on the novel by Anthony Hope. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Edited by Hal C. Kern and James E. Newcom. Art direction by Lyle Wheeler. With Ronald Colman, Madeleine Carroll, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., C. Aubrey Smith, Raymond Massey, Mary Astor, David Niven. Rightly convinced that a Victorian story of romance and swashbuckling adventure would play to Depression-era audiences, David O. Selznick brought Anthony Hope’s 1894 novel—a childhood favorite of his—to the screen for the third and by far the most thrilling time. Ronald Colman plays dual roles as a commoner and his double, the King, at one point shaking hands with himself through Howe’s masterful split-screen photography. Selznick had great faith in Howe’s ability to create an atmosphere of courtly intrigue through low-key lighting; "I am counting on you," he wrote in a letter during production, "to avoid the stagy appearance of most exterior sets that are built on the stage; to give us real night photography that will not hesitate to lose figures in deep shadows at the same time that it gives enough light for expressions on faces." Print restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, courtesy Turner Entertainment Co. 100 min.Thursday, August 9, 6:00 p.m.; Friday, August 10, 3:30 p.m.
The Spanish Dancer
. 1923. USA. Directed by Herbert Brenon. Written by Beulah Marie Dix and June Mathis, based on the novel Don César de Bazan by Adolphe d’Ennery and Philippe François Pinel. With Pola Negri, Antonio Moreno, Wallace Berry, Adolphe Menjou, Anne Shirley. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Negri stars as a tempestuous gypsy dancer who seduces Spain’s King Philip IV into restoring a penniless nobleman's estates. Howe, who would go on to photograph seven other Herbert Brenon pictures, recalled that the costume drama, "had big, big settings, out on the Lasky Ranch, a huge castle where Forest Lawn is now; we had 3,000 extras. Oddly enough, Mary Pickford was doing a film at the same time with exactly the same theme: Rosita." 53 min.The Rough Riders
(unedited footage). 1927. USA. Directed by Victor Fleming. Written by Robert N. Lee and Keene Thompson, based on a story by Hermann Hagedorn as adapted by John F. Goodrich. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Titles by George Marion, Jr. With Charles Farrell, Wallace Beery, Mary Astor, George Bancroft, Charles Emmett Mack. Beery skips jail to join up with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in the Battle of San Juan Hill. This popular adventure picture was filmed in the scrubby outskirts of San Antonio, where William Wellman was simultaneously shooting Wings. Howe worked with director Fleming (himself a former cameraman) to construct a forerunner of the modern crab dolly, which he described as "a four-wheel carriage with a counterbalanced arm that could raise and lower two cameras while following the action of moving men and horses." He later recalled, "I always remember the sight of 400 buckjumpers trying out their skill in breaking in horses for our tests at San Antonio; there was so much dust you couldn’t see anything except vague figures flying dismounted through the air." App. 20 min. Both films silent, with piano accompaniment by Ben Model.Friday, August 10, 6:00 p.m.; Monday, August 13, 3:30 p.m.
Mantrap
. 1926. USA. Directed by Victor Fleming. Written by Adelaide Heilbron and Ethel Doherty, based on the novel by Sinclair Lewis. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Titles by George Marion, Jr. Assistant director: Henry Hathaway. With Clara Bow, Ernest Torrence, Percy Marmont and Eugene Pallette. Victor Fleming’s Mantrap, about an improbable love triangle in the great Northern wilderness, was based on Sinclair Lewis’s 1925 novel satirizing contemporary attitudes toward flappers and divorcées. Clara Bow secured her reputation as the vivacious "It" girl of the Roaring Twenties in her role as Alverna, a Minneapolis manicurist who recklessly marries a burly frontier man and then lures a slick New York lawyer into stealing her away from him. Silent film heroines like Bow, Pola Negri and Mary Miles Minter relied on cinematographer Howe to make them look young and fresh through soft, diffuse frontal lighting and strong top- and backlighting. In Mantrap, Howe and Fleming use clever camera movements to comment on the action: a close-up of a woman applying lipstick in a hand-mirror pulls back in a brisk dolly shot to reveal Bow to us for the first time, underscoring her charming narcissism. Silent, with piano accompaniment by Ben Model. 68 min.Friday, August 10, 8:00 p.m.; Saturday, August 11, 2:00 p.m.
Hello, Sister!
1933. USA. Directed by Edwin Burke and Alfred Werker (and Erich von Stroheim and Raoul Walsh, uncredited). Written by von Stroheim and Leonard Spigelgass, based on the unproduced play Walking Down Broadway by Dawn Powell. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Edited by Frank Hull. Art direction by William Darling. With James Dunn, Zasu Pitts, Minna Gombell, Boots Mallory. In 1931 von Stroheim got his first chance to direct a talking picture when Fox signed him to adapt Dawn Powell’s unproduced play Walking Down Broadway. Von Stroheim’s shooting script brought out Powell’s underlying pessimism by transforming her simple American characters into complicated neurotics and elaborating on the story’s intimations of rape, alcoholism, and suicide. Howe, who was assigned to shoot the picture, shared von Stroheim’s obsession with pictorial beauty, and together they devised some ingenious lighting setups, including a dime-a-dance hall scene in which they mounted a camera on a mobile lampstand to "dance" with the actors. But after a disastrous preview of the rough cut, in which one studio executive reportedly called the film "fit only to be shown to a convention of psychologists," von Stroheim was thrown off the lot and Edwin Burke, Alfred Werker and Raoul Walsh were brought in for retakes. The considerably toned down Hello, Sister! flopped on its release in 1933, and what remains of von Stroheim’s original footage is still up for debate. 60 min.Saturday, August 11, 5:00 p.m.; Tuesday, August 14, 3:30 p.m.
Kings Row.
1942. USA. Directed by Sam Wood. Written by Casey Robinson, based on the novel by Henry Bellamann. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Edited by Ralph Dawson. Production design by William Cameron Menzies. Music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. With Ann Sheridan, Robert Cummings, Ronald Reagan, Betty Field, Charles Coburn, Claude Rains, Judith Anderson. One doubts that the burghers of Fulton, Missouri, held a homecoming parade for Bellamann when his period novel of smalltown life became a bestseller in 1940. Warner Bros. snatched up the screen rights to his sordid tale of madness, jealousy, murder, mutilation, and suicide (omitting only the euthanasia subplot and the heroine’s incestuous relationship with her father) and hired Sam Wood, fresh from Our Town, to direct. While Wood busied himself with the actors (Reagan may be most remembered, but Coburn, Rains, Field and Anderson were superb), cinematographer Howe and art director Menzies were left to design the rich, melodramatic look of the film, and Korngold to compose the moody, lush score. Remarkably, Kings Row was shot entirely on the Warner lot, and Menzies created the sets with specific lenses and camera angles in mind. Print courtesy Turner Entertainment Co. 127 min.Sunday, August 12, 2:00 p.m.; Monday, August 13, 6:00 p.m.
The Hard Way.
1942. USA. Directed by Vincent Sherman. Written by Daniel Fuchs and Peter Viertel, based on a story by Jerry Wald. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Edited by Thomas Pratt. Montages by Don Siegel. Art direction by Max Parker. Music by M.K. Jerome and Jack Scholl. With Ida Lupino, Dennis Morgan, Joan Leslie, Jack Carson and Gladys George. In his February 20, 1943 review for The Nation James Agee wrote, "The story—the pathetic, cheated woman who wrecks lives right and left in the effort to realize herself through a younger sister—is liable to go ham even aside from Bette Davis’s virtual patent on it…Even so, there is a good deal in it to excite and to please. Much of the dialogue of Fuchs and Viertel is a dozen times more loaded and acute than average, and Fuchs’s genius for writing quarrels would alone make the picture worth seeing….James Wong Howe’s first few minutes with the camera, in a Pennsylvania mill town, all but floored me with gratitude. He goes on the list with Hitchcock as one of the few men of whom it can be hoped that, given the chance, they may yet take advantage of the $5,000 ceiling on sets to use this country as it ought to be used in films, and as it has scarcely been touched." Print courtesy Turner Entertainment Co. 108 min.Sunday, August 12, 5:00 p.m.; Friday, August 17, 3:30 p.m.
Hangmen Also Die!
1943. USA. Directed by Fritz Lang. Written by John Wexley (and Bertolt Brecht and Lang, uncredited), based on an original story by Brecht and Lang. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Edited by Gene Fowler, Jr. Art direction by William Darling. Music by Hanns Eisler. With Brian Donleavy, Walter Brennan, Anna Lee, Gene Lockhart and Margaret Wycherly. Written in collaboration with Bertolt Brecht during his exile in America, Hangmen Also Die! was the second of Fritz Lang’s three anti-Nazi films, made in rapid succession between 1941 and 1944. Lang and Brecht took as their inspiration the then-recent May 1942 assassination in Prague of "Reichsprotektor" Reinhard Heydrich—the "Hangman of Europe"—who helped mastermind the systematic extermination of Jews during the early years of World War II and whose death the Gestapo avenged in the massacre of more than 1,600 Czechs in the town of Lidice. The nightmarish visions of Lang’s silent German melodramas is recalled in James Wong Howe’s expressionistic photography, which turns every dark alleyway into a potential trap and every neighbor into a possible quisling. 131 min.Thursday, August 16, 3:30 p.m.; Sunday, August 19, 5:00 p.m.
Pursued.
1947. USA. Directed by Raoul Walsh. Written by Niven Busch. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Edited by Christian Nyby. Art direction by Ted Smith. Music by Max Steiner. With Teresa Wright, Robert Mitchum, Judith Anderson, Dean Jagger and Harry Carey, Jr. Structured in noirish flashback and confronting mythical themes of abandonment, fratricide and incest, Walsh’s Pursued was a forerunner of the psychological Westerns of the 1950s, most notably Rancho Notorious, Johnny Guitar, Apache, and The Naked Spur. Mitchum is extraordinary as a brooding war hero who is driven into the wilderness by a lynch mob seeking to avenge his father’s sin. As the killers close in and Mitchum grows increasingly haunted by a childhood memory, the wide-open, barren spaces of the West are rendered claustrophobic through Howe’s striking photography. Dramatic deep focus and high-contrast infrared film for the night scenes also conjure Mitchum’s sense of impending doom. Print restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. 101 min.Thursday, August 16, 6:00 p.m.; Saturday, August 18, 2:00 p.m.
Viva Villa!
1934. USA. Directed by Jack Conway (and Howard Hawks, uncredited). Written by Ben Hecht (and Hawks, uncredited), based on the novel by Edgecumb Pinchon and O.B. Stade. Cinematography by James Wong Howe (in Mexico) and Charles G. Clarke (in Hollywood). Edited by Robert J. Kern. Art direction by Harry Oliver. Music by Herbert Stothart. With Wallace Beery, Leo Carrillo, Fay Wray, Donald Cook, Joseph Schildkraut and Henry B. Walthall. Upon joining MGM in 1933, David O. Selznick hired director Howard Hawks and screenwriter Ben Hecht, the celebrated creators of Scarface, to make a film about the life of the Mexican peasant revolutionary Pancho Villa. Hoping to create a convincingly realistic look for the historical epic, Selznick gave Howard Hawks and cinematographer James Wong Howe the freedom to shoot for weeks on location in the hinterlands of Mexico. Howe brought out the harshness of the sunbaked landscape, with its extremes of light and shadow, by using minimal fill on the actors’ faces, and also used red filters to accentuate the spectacular rolling clouds hanging heavily over the parched earth. But as the production dragged on, the budget soared, and as studio head Louis B. Mayer got wind of the outrageous, hard-drinking antics of the cast and crew, Hawks was summarily fired and replaced by Jack Conway, who finished the film in Los Angeles. Print courtesy Turner Entertainment Co. 115 min.Friday, August 17, 6:00 p.m.; Saturday, August 18, 5:00 p.m.
Air Force
. 1943. USA. Directed by Howard Hawks (and Vincent Sherman, uncredited). Written by Dudley Nichols (and William Faulkner, uncredited). Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Aerial photography by Elmer Dyer and Charles Marshall. Edited by George Amy. Art direction by John Hughes. Music by Franz Waxman. With John Garfield, John Ridgely, Gig Young, Arthur Kennedy, Harry Carey, George Tobias. Air Force was Warner Bros.’s first major contribution to the Allied effort, begun in the immediate aftermath of the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor. Howard Hawks, a veteran of the Army Air Corps during World War I, strove to make the story of a B-17 bomber crew as convincing as possible by securing the use of a real Flying Fortress and other essential munitions from military top brass, looking to screenwriter Dudley Nichols and an uncredited William Faulkner for unsentimental dialogue (and rewriting what was not), and relying on cinematographer James Wong Howe, special effects whiz Hans Koenekamp, and other expert technicians to recreate the look of newsreel combat footage. In photographing the interior bombing scenes, Howe used a dimmer to simulate light flickering through the clouds and evoked rough landings and dogfights with Japanese Zeros by alternating between a handheld Eyemo camera and a camera mounted on a rocking device. Praised on its release in 1943 as a rousing wartime drama, Air Force today is considered one of Howard Hawks’ noblest works, a stoic yet supremely moving tribute to what critic Robin Wood called "the triumph of individualism placed at the service of something beyond itself." New 35mm print. 124 min.Friday, August 17, 8:15 p.m.; Sunday, August 19, 2:00 p.m.
Objective, Burma!
1945. USA. Directed by Raoul Walsh. Written by Ranald MacDougall and Lester Cole, based on a story by Alvah Bessie. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Edited by George Amy. Art direction by Ted Smith. Music by Franz Waxman. With Errol Flynn, James Brown, George Tobias, Henry Hull, William Prince. James Wong Howe’s two wartime combat films, Air Force and Objective Burma!, balance documentary realism with the heightened melodramatic realism that was Warner Bros.’s trademark look in the 1940s. Objective Burma! was shot on a studio set and in the scrubby swamps of Orange County, which Walsh and Howe tried to conceal by strategically placing potted tropical plants in the foreground and by cutting in stock footage of actual battles. As critic Todd Rainsberger has noted, Howe matched his original photography to the stock imagery by scratching the emulsion and pre-flashing the film, giving it a similarly grainy, washed-out newsreel quality. Remarkably, he also restricted his use of artificial light for the nighttime assault sequence. Print courtesy Turner Entertainment Co. 141 min.Monday, August 20, 3:30 p.m.; Tuesday, August 21, 6:00 p.m.
Yankee Doodle Dandy.
1942. USA. Directed by Michael Curtiz. Written by Robert Buckner and Edmund Joseph, based on a story by Buckner. Cinematography by James Wong Howe (and Sol Polito, uncredited). Edited by George Amy. Montages by Don Siegel. Art direction by Carl Jules Weyl. With James Cagney, Joan Leslie, Walter Huston, Richard Whorf, Irene Manning, Rosemary DeCamp. A rousing piece of Americana for a nation newly at war, Yankee Doodle Dandy was by far the most successful of Curtiz’s six musical biopics, owing largely to Cagney’s stunning performance as the patriotic songwriter and impressario George M. Cohan and to standout appearances by Walter Huston and Irene Manning. Cinematographer Howe’s pans, dollys and crane shots keep step with Cagney’s electric footwork, and his black-and-white tonal range is elegantly expressive and varied, from the soft, nostalgic glow of the oil lamps in Cohan’s blooming vaudeville days to the bright, brash artificiality of the footlights in his big Broadway numbers. New 35 mm print courtesy Turner Entertainment Co. 125 min.Monday, August 20, 6:00 p.m.; Tuesday, August 21, 3:30 p.m.
Passage to Marseille.
1944. USA. Directed by Michael Curtiz. Written by Casey Robinson and Jack Moffitt, based on the novel Men without Country by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Edited by Owen Marks. Art direction by Carl Jules Weyl. Music by Max Steiner. With Humphrey Bogart, Claude Rains, Michele Morgan, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Philip Dorn and George Tobias. With its deep shadows and shafts of light, Howe’s low-key photography lends an aura of melodramatic intrigue to this World War II adventure story about a group of Devil’s Island escapees who join up with Free French sailors on a freighter bound for Nazi-occupied France. Banking on the tremendous success of Casablanca, Warners head Hal B. Wallis reunited director Curtiz, designer Carl Jules Weyl, and composer Max Steiner, and cast actors Bogart and Lorre as the fugitive heroes, Greenstreet as a magnificently unholy Fascist sympathizer, and Rains as a patriotic captain who spins the tale through multiple flashbacks. Print courtesy Turner Entertainment Co. 110 min.Thursday, August 23, 3:30 p.m.; Friday, August 24, 8:00 p.m.
Body and Soul.
1947. USA. Directed by Robert Rossen. Written by Abraham Polonsky. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Edited by Francis D. Lyon and Robert Parrish. Art direction by Nathan Juran and Edward J. Boyle. Music by Hugo Friedhofer. With John Garfield, Lilli Palmer, Anne Revere, Hazel Brooks, William Conrad, Joseph Pevney, Canada Lee. Rossen’s antiheroes are typically poor, headstrong men trapped by their naked ambition; corrupted by power and success, they sell out their youthful ideals. Such is the fate of John Garfield’s Charley Davis, the boxer in Body and Soul, whose desperate efforts to escape tenement life put him at the mercy of fixers. Rossen and Howe, who both boxed professionally in their youth, gave Charley’s final match an unparalleled excitement and brutality by shooting it from numerous vantage points, using three cameras placed on cranes for overhead views, three mounted on dollies, and, most effectively, two held by hand (something the producers had refused to let Howe do in two earlier boxing films, Busby Berkeley’s They Made Me a Criminal, 1939, and Anatole Litvak’s City for Conquest, 1940). For greater mobility, Howe strapped on roller skates and had a grip push him around the ring, jerking the hand-held camera slightly whenever a punch was landed and occasionally moving out of focus to suggest a pummeled fighter’s groggy perspective. 104 min.Thursday, August 23, 6:00 p.m.; Saturday, August 25, 5:00 p.m.
The Brave Bulls.
1951. USA. Directed by Robert Rossen. Written by Tom Bright, based on the novel by Tom Lea. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Edited by Harry Batista. Art direction by Cary Odell and Frank Tuttle. With Mel Ferrer, Miroslava Stern, Anthony Quinn, Eugene Iglesias, Charlita. Robert Rossen was blacklisted shortly after the release of The Brave Bulls, and must have sensed his impending doom when he filmed Tom Lea’s novel about a poor Mexican peasant who rises to become Mexico’s most beloved matador and then is nearly destroyed by greedy promoters and parasitic fans. Rossen and Howe shot the bullring like the boxing ring in Body and Soul, the air thick with heat and corruption and excitement, the shadow play of man and beast inscribed on the blinding white sand. To film the charging bull, Howe strapped a 16mm camera with a wide angle lens onto a real matador. He also dug a pit near the bullring to shoot through the animals’ hooves, borrowing a technique that Leni Riefenstahl had used to photograph long jumpers in Olympia.106 min.Friday, August 24, 3:30 p.m.; Saturday, August 25, 2:00 p.m.
The Baron of Arizona.
1950. USA. Written and directed by Samuel Fuller. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Edited by Arthur Hilton. Art direction by F. Paul Sylos. Music by Paul Dunlap. With Vincent Price, Ellen Drew, Vladimir Sokoloff, Beulah Bondi and Reed Hadley. Hailed by one critic as "a masterpiece of the pulp imagination," Samuel Fuller’s low-budget second feature The Baron of Arizona tells the strange, true story of 19th-century con man James Addison Reavis, a land office clerk who spent two years in a Federal penitentiary for attempting to swindle the United States government out of the Territory of Arizona. Fuller’s angle was the play up the perversely romantic relationship between Reavis and the orphaned Mexican girl whom he had coerced into becoming his Baroness. He hired his friend James Wong Howe to shoot the film in only twelve days (giving the lie to Howe’s reputation as a slow cinematographer), and with the sparest of means Howe captured the dark Gothic eroticism and brutality of Fuller’s script. 96 min.Friday, August 24, 6:00 p.m.; Sunday, August 26, 2:00 p.m.
He Ran All the Way
. 1951. USA. Directed by John Berry. Written by Guy Endore (and Dalton Trumbo and Hugo Butler, uncredited), based on the novel by Sam Ross. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Edited by Francis D. Lyon. Production design by Harry Horner. Music by Franz Waxman. With John Garfield, Shelley Winters, Wallace Ford, Gladys George, Norman Lloyd, Selena Royle. In an interview with Charles Higham in Hollywood Camermen, James Wong Howe observed, "One of the very best pictures I have done was He Ran All the Way. It was the story of a criminal who holds up a family in New York. It was very, very realistic. We had a tiny apartment, exactly copied from a real one, and put the camera in a wheelchair and pushed the cameraman around. For an indoor swimming-pool scene we actually got right into the pool with swimming-trunks and used hand-held shots through splashing water….We got enough reflection from the water to give their faces texture; if had I had put too much light in it would have washed out the faces. That’s the danger in many films of overlighting, over-correcting. Of course, some stars wanted the light very bright, to wash out their lines!" Print courtesy MGM/UA. 77 min.Sunday, August 26, 5:00 p.m.; Monday, August 27, 3:30 p.m.
Sweet Smell of Success.
1957. USA. Directed by Alexander Mackendrick. Written by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, based on Lehman’s story "Tell Me About It Tomorrow." Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Edited by Alan Crosland, Jr. Art direction by Edward Carrere. Music by Elmer Bernstein. With Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Susan Harrison, Martin Milner, Sam Levene, and the Chico Hamilton Quintet. "I love this dirty town…." James Wong Howe brilliantly captures the sinister seductions and neurotic impulses of fifties New York in his noir-and-neon photography for Sweet Smell of Success. Making his impressive American debut was the British Ealing comedies director Alexander Mackendrick, who spared no bile in bringing Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman’s nasty piece of work to the screen. Chris Auty in Time Out calls Sweet Smell a "rat trap of a film in which a vicious New York gossip hustler grovels for his ‘Mr. Big,’ a monster newspaper columnist [modeled on Walter Winchell] who is incestuously obsessed with destroying his kid sister’s romance…and a figure as evil and memorable as Orson Welles in The Third Man or Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter. The dark streets gleam with the sweat of fear; Elmer Bernstein’s limpid jazz score (courtesy of Chico Hamilton) whispers corruption in the Big City." Print courtesy MGM/UA. 96 min.Monday, August 27, 6:00 p.m.; Tuesday, August 28, 3:30 p.m.
The Rose Tattoo
. 1955. USA. Directed by Daniel Mann. Written by Tennessee Williams, based on his play. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Edited by Warren Low. Music by Alex North. Art direction by Hal Pereira and Tambi Larsen. With Anna Magnani, Burt Lancaster, Marisa Pavan, Ben Cooper, Virginia Grey, Jo Van Fleet. Burt Lancaster’s mannered method acting is no match for Anna Magnani’s Vesuvian-tempered performance as the widow dressmaker Serafina, a role Tennessee Williams wrote expressly for her in his by-now somewhat overheated, rampantly symbolic play. Howe’s Oscar-winning photography is keyed to Magnani’s darkening disposition; as illusions of her dead husband’s fidelity fall away, a somber, elegiac light creeps into her world-weary face and the house that is her asylum. Print courtesy Paramount Pictures. 116 min.Tuesday, August 28, 6:00 p.m.; Friday, August 31, 3:30 p.m.
The Old Man and the Sea.
1958. USA. Directed by John Sturges. Written by Peter Viertel, based on the story by Ernest Hemingway. Cinematography by James Wong Howe, Floyd Crosby, Tom Tutwiler and Lamar Boren. Edited by Arthur P. Schmidt. Art direction by Art Loel and Edward Carrere. Music by Dmitri Tiomkin. With Spencer Tracy, Felipe Pazos, Harry Bellaver. Warner Bros. got more than it bargained for by agreeing to underwrite Leland Hayward’s elaborate production of The Old Man and the Sea. Difficult location shoots in the waters off Cuba, Peru, and Hawaii took months and millions to complete. Fred Zinnemann quit in frustration after being buffeted by Hemingway and Spencer Tracy, and his replacement, John Sturges, was hamstrung by Peter Viertel’s overly reverential script. If nothing else, James Wong Howe’s painterly color photography, which one critic derided as "the visual equivalent of purple passages," was a triumph of technical improvisation under extremely challenging circumstances. Howe recalled that "both in the West Indies and at the studio, I many times left off the normally indispensable light shade of the lens. By admitting a limited amount of glare we were able to convey the effect of the intense heat and sunlight which the Old Man endured during his ordeal." Print courtesy Turner Entertainment Co. 89 min.Thursday, August 30, 3:30 p.m.; Friday, August 31, 8:15 p.m.
The Molly Maguires.
1970. USA. Directed by Martin Ritt. Written by Walter Bernstein. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Edited by Frank Bracht. Art direction by Tambi Larsen. Music by Henry Mancini. With Richard Harris, Sean Connery, Samantha Eggar and Frank Finlay. The Molly Maguires was a secret society of Irish-American miners who fought and sometimes died for better working conditions in the anthracite coalfields of Pennsylvania and West Virginia in the 1860s and 1870s. Director Martin Ritt and screenwriter Walter Bernstein, both veterans of the blacklist, took as their inspiration a series of sensational trials that relied on the suspect testimony of a Pinkerton infiltrator to bring about the convictions and hangings of ten Irish workers for sabotage and terrorist assassination. Pauline Kael called the resulting film, "a failure, nailed on its own aspirations to the tragic and epic, [but] an impressive failure," contending that the miners had been turned into heroic martyrs to advance the filmmakers’ own political cause (which can also be said to be true of two other great mining films, G.W. Pabst’s Kameradschaft,1930, and Carol Reed’s The Stars Look Down, 1939). James Wong Howe’s photography, so sooty one forgets it was shot in color, was self-consciously exquisite but exquisite nonetheless, the result of painstaking research into how a coal mine must have seemed in the nineteenth century. Howe used an extremely fast Eastman film stock for its Rembrandt effects and borrowed tiny quartz lamps from NASA to simulate the coal-oil lamps that miners would attach to their helmets as they wormed their way through the chthonic darkness. 124 min.Thursday, August 30, 6:00 p.m.; Friday, August 31, 6:00 p.m.
Hud
. 1963. USA. Directed by Martin Ritt. Written by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr., based on the novel Horseman, Pass By by Larry McMurtry. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Edited by Frank Bracht. Art direction by Hal Pereira and Tambi Larsen. Music by Elmer Bernstein. With Paul Newman, Melvyn Douglas, Patricia Neal, Brandon De Wilde, John Ashley, Whit Bissell. In his September 1963 review for The New Republic, critic Dwight MacDonald held high praise for the naturalistic look James Wong Howe gave to Hud, otherwise shrugging the film off as an unsubtle morality play of generational conflict between a stiff-necked, blue-blooded cattle rancher (Douglas) and his hedonistic, malcontented son (Newman). "The uncompromising realism is mostly in the veteran Howe’s photography," he wrote, "which does give an unretouched picture of the arid, scrubby landscape of West Texas, its neon-squalid towns and its cheap clapboard houses, belligerently charmless inside and out. The director, Martin Ritt, must also be praised for attempting a contemporary Western that eschews glamour and heroics." 112 min.Saturday, September 1, 5:00 p.m.; Monday, September 3, 3:30 p.m.
The Spider.
1931. USA. Directed by William Cameron Menzies and Kenneth MacKenna. Written by Barry Conners and Philip Klein, based on the play by Fulton Oursler and Lowell Brentano. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Edited by Al De Gaetano. With Edmund Lowe, Lois Moran, El Brendel and George E. Stone. With a nod to the grotesquely bizarre movie thrillers he designed for Roland West in the 1920s, Menzies made his directing debut with this mystery-melodrama about an amnesiac mind reader forced to prove his innocence in the murder of a wealthy financier. Menzies worked closely with Howe in determining the precise lenses, lighting setups and camera angles for each shot—a process that appealed to Howe’s penchant for meticulous planning, and one that gave their subsequent collaborations, Menzies’s own Chandu the Magician, Norman Taurog’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Sam Wood’s Kings Row, such visual distinction. The Spider is no less striking, with mysteriously silhouetted figures moving against stark, austere backgrounds, and strong, jagged diagonals used as an accentuating compositional device. Print restored by UCLA Film and Television Archive. 65 min.Sunday, September 2, 2:00 p.m.; Monday, September 3, 6:00 p.m.
Th
e North Star. 1943. USA. Directed by Lewis Milestone. Written by Lillian Hellman. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Edited by Daniel Mandell. Music by Aaron Copland and Ira Gershwin. With Dana Andrews, Walter Huston, Anne Baxter, Ann Harding and Erich von Stroheim, Walter Brennan, Farley Granger. Milestone, who spent the first eighteen years of his life as Lewis Milsten of Chisnau, near Odessa, before emigrating to America in 1913, was moved to direct The North Star at the height of World War II out of fondness for his former homeland and in horror of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis against ordinary Russian civilians. The film was cited by J. Parnell Thomas and Richard Nixon, along with Michael Curtiz’s Mission to Moscow and Gregory Ratoff’s Song of Russia (also made in 1943), as evidence of the Red menace in Hollywood, which led to the graylisting of Milestone and blacklisting of screenwriter Hellman. But The North Star seems less compelling as a political statement—which can best be called naïve—than as a devastating vision of war, forcefully conveyed through Milestone and Howe’s sweeping tracking shots of strafing fighter planes and invading cavalrymen, and their Goyaesque close-ups of anguished faces. Print restored by UCLA Film and Television Archive. 105 min.Sunday, September 2, 5:00 p.m.; Tuesday, September 4, 3:30 p.m.
Seconds.
1966. USA. Directed by John Frankenheimer. Written by Lewis John Carlino, based on the novel by David Ely. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Edited by David Webster and Ferris Webster. Music by Jerry Goldsmith. With Rock Hudson, John Randolph, Salome Jens, Will Geer and Jeff Corey. Over the years, critical esteem has grown considerably for Frankenheimer’s cooly clinical Seconds, about a middle-aged banker who makes a Faustian bargain with science to begin his life anew. An incisive statement on the dehumanizing effects of technology and on the American male’s regressive yearning for eternal youth, Seconds is made remarkable by James Wong Howe’s claustrophobic camerawork, with its fish-eye lens contortions and convolutions, which earned him his tenth Oscar nomination and represented a significant departure from his accustomed reverence for realism. 106 min.