James Wong Howe

Like, I started working with people, you know, whether it was, like, John Toll or certain camera operators.

They were, like, in this – they were lineages, right? And like I was, you know, never got anywhere near like James Wong Howe, of course, but I was in that lineage of like James Wong Howe and like John Alonzo.

And these people were like samurai.

Like that was like the way you comported yourself on a movie set.

It was.

The cinematographer is the legendary James Wong Howe, who had been shooting films since the silent era.

One of the greatest, greatest cinematographers ever.

And he and Frankenheimer... decided they were going to develop this aggressive, subjective style to put viewers inside Arthur Hamilton's world.

We are inside his mind.

That scene in Grand Central Station is so disturbing because what James Wong Howe did was strap a camera to the back of John Randolph.

And as he's walking, that's our view.

That's our perspective.

It's not exactly the real world, although it feels like it for huge chunks of the film, but there's a lot of psychological imagery here.

There's some weird shit, some strange camera work that almost feels like a James Wong Howe has the camera with fisheye lens from the '60s, like in the movie Seconds from John Frankenheimer.

But you see this really bizarre world, and an actress like Helena Bonham Carter, who, I mean, she made classy period pieces, A Room with a View, movies like that.

Wings of the Dove in '97, she got an Oscar nomination.

when it was released, but it's so worthy of attention, from the direction to the taut screenplay.

James Wong Howe's cinematography in this is fantastic, and Garfield's searing performance is a must-see.

So the timeline of this, of when Mr. Garfield passed away, this film was shot at the end of 1950, when Garfield was 37 years old.

It opened in June of 1951 in New York City, and Garfield died just 11 months later of a heart attack at the age of 39.

A blackjack, not rubber jack.

Um, now, uh, there was reflections by the cinematographer James Wong Howe.

James Wong Howe's- ... perception of this film is kind of colored also by the fact that he's replaced midway through the production.

Um, Howe later said in interviews that it wasn't one of his favorite pictures.

Uh, Scalbert says that he called Browning quite a character, one of the old school who didn't know too much about the camera.

He had the actors play at the camera instead of moving it around, so the picture was very stagey and he used cutting to get him through it.

Well, it also probably doesn't help that you're James Wong Howe and you do take a long time to get the scene lit-

Yeah

So with this film, I feel like we could almost just approach this piece by piece with all the many great things that contribute to th- to this film.

I wanna start with James Wong Howe's cinematography.

He s- you know, started the silent era, worked through the '70s, ha- trying on all kinds of different looks.

Like, this doesn't necessarily look like Body and Soul.

They reveal themselves over time when a good film that was at first misunderstood gets critical redemption later on down the line.

A movie like John Frankenheimer's Seconds, for example, which I just talked about last month during my series on the cinematography of James Wong Howe, booed at Cannes, panned by critics, but ultimately recognized for the masterful bit of psycho horror sci-fi it is and always was, many years after the fact.

I think this is where Jarmusch has always put me off, this obvious intent, because he isn't actually doing something ahead of his time.

He is consciously and effortfully manufacturing something quirky, and at the same time, he's trying to give the appearance of not making an effort at all.