The Elmer Bernstein-scored
Sweet Smell of Success is one of my favorite older movies because it's cynical, hard-bitten, pre-curse-words-allowed-in-movies Hollywood screenwriting at its best. Its cinematographer was James Wong Howe.
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| Sweet Smell of Success (Photo source: DVD Beaver) |
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| Sweet Smell of Success (Photo source: DVD Beaver) |
Howe's sterling work in black and white also graced the first
Thin Man installment and
Hud, two films that I first saw on TCM and are always worth revisiting on that channel, partly because of Howe's cinematography.
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| The Thin Man (Photo source: FilmFanatic.org) |
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| Hud (Photo source: This Distracted Globe) |
In 2004, I wrote and recorded three Asian Pacific American Heritage Month interstitials for the Fistful of Soundtracks channel. One interstitial centered on Howe. The other two were about Margaret Cho and
Homicide: Life on the Street writer James Yoshimura. Below is the entire three-minute interstitial I did on Howe. The last time I heard my Howe segment was about eight years ago. I forgot that I worked Method Man's "Bring the Pain" into the segment. Nice choice for a bed, 2004 me.
Take it away, partial transcript of 2004 me:
"Howe was one of the first cinematographers who perfected deep focus photography, in which both the foreground and the distant background are clearly seen. Another Howe innovation was the way he shot the boxing sequences in
Body and Soul. A boxer himself when he was a teenager, Howe grabbed a pair of roller skates, climbed into the ring with the actors and filmed the action with a handheld camera. Though only five-foot-two, Howe was a badass. He was described by those who knew him as a tough perfectionist and a taskmaster. He was openly hostile to film crews. He was particularly hostile towards racists and had to deal with them on and off the sets. In an
L.A. Times article, Howe's Caucasian widow recalled an incident at a restaurant in which a bigot tried to humiliate Howe and his wife by shoving them off their seats. Howe got the best of the bully using his high school boxing skills… Howe died in 1976, leaving behind a body of work that influenced cinematographers everywhere. Howe was a man who worked hard with his lights and camera to capture beauty, even if it was in a town that exhibited the ugliest behavior towards him and his people."
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| Come on, everybody, wear your roller skates today. (Photo source: Film Monitor) |
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