[Late last year, in preparation for a podcast appearance of my wife’s, we watched Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), and through it were introduced to the groundbreaking cinematographer and all-around amazing American James Wong Howe. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for Howe’s exemplary life, leading to a post on that podcast!]
On chance encounters, movie magic, and the best of the American Dream.
Not long after the close of his short-lived semi-pro boxing career, the teenage James Wong Howe continued his search for both a place and a profession: moving first to San Francisco where he briefly attended aviation school; and then to Los Angeles where he worked various jobs including as a busboy at the recently opened Beverly Hills Hotel. But he wasn’t in LA for very long before he had a pair of fortuitous, interconnected encounters that brought him into the emerging film industry: he ran into a former boxing friend who was working as a photographer for one of Mack Sennett’s short films, which led to Howe landing a job with cinematographer Alvin Wyckoff at Famous Players-Lasky studios; and while working as a clapper on the set of the silent film The Little American (1917), Howe was noticed by director Cecil B. DeMille and brought on for a larger role as a camera assistant.
Howe was a short man (apparently 5’3”, if the intertubes can be believed anyway), and the story goes that DeMille had initially been drawn to the striking visual of this little young man (really still a teenager) chomping on a large cigar while performing his job as clapper. Drawn, that is, to the sight of a little American on the set of the film of the same name. And perhaps also drawn, I would add (and in any case this AmericanStudier is definitely drawn), to the symbolism of that presence on that particular film set, as The Little American is very much a story of multi-cultural and -national American communities and stories: its title character, silent film superstar (and also a producer on this film) Mary Pickford’s Angela More, is a Franco-American immigrant who at the start of the film is being wooed by both a German American young man and a French Count, all against the backdrop of the Great War (World War I) into which she and the audience are drawn very fully as the story develops. While of course China and the Pacific were less part of that war than they would be the Second World War, I still really love that Howe’s big break took place on the set of such an overtly international film.
That break also both echoes and extends some of our most prominent images of “the American Dream” (a phrase that wouldn’t be explicitly used until about a decade later, but a concept that was of course already present in our collective consciousness). I’m thinking specifically of Horatio Alger’s famous rags-to-riches novels, in a significant percentage of which the young hero’s first big break is a chance encounter with a wealthy and powerful man who can and does help them gain entrance into communities and opportunities beyond their own. There’s no doubt that Howe’s encounter with DeMille embodies such a moment, but at the same time I would stress how much Howe had brought himself to that point, on a number of interconnected levels: through his personal and professional explorations after his Dad’s passing; through his multiple moves in pursuit of those next stages of life and career; and through his clearly instinctive talents as a photographer and cinematographer (on which a great deal more in tomorrow’s post). If Howe’s American Dream really began on that film set, he had nonetheless already been moving and working toward it for many impressive years.
Next Howe context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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