I recently read Five Came Back, a fascinating book about five major Hollywood directors who went into military service during World War II. And it’s great, and I highly recommend reading it, and all that. But what struck me was a few throwaway references to cinematographer James Wong Howe. I’ll be honest—I’m not as up on cinematographers as a lot of other people around here. It’s not that I don’t catch great cinematography, it’s more that it’s not the first thing I think about when I’m looking at a movie, at least not usually. But you’ve got to admire someone who was nominated for ten Best Cinematography Oscars from 1938 to1975, winning twice. He made some damn fine movies over the years and isn’t brought up as often as you might expect.

Of course, there’s the racism. The book casually mentions that he couldn’t get the same clearance as the others because he wasn’t a citizen and neglects to mention that he couldn’t get citizenship because he was Chinese by birth. Howe’s father brought the family to the US in 1904, when the boy was five, and he wasn’t eligible for US citizenship until 1943, with the repeal of the Chinese Exclusionary Act. He married writer Sanora Babb in Paris in 1937 and did not have his marriage recognized by the State of California until the law against interracial marriages was struck down more than ten years later. When they found a judge to marry them, the judge actually called Howe a “Chink.”

There’s also the not-quite-Communism. While Babb was blacklisted and moved to Mexico to avoid damaging Howe’s career further, he was merely graylisted and had a harder time working. Though I admit it’s hard to see much of a slowdown in a career that spans 144 movies in 56 years. And one of his two Oscar wins was for The Rose Tattoo in 1955. He doesn’t seem to have fully slowed down until he reached retirement age. Still, that might contribute to why his name doesn’t get brought up as much in conversations about the great cinematographers.

One way or another, though, he worked with just about everybody, both behind the camera and in front of it. He worked on the live action bits of Fantasia, for heaven’s sake. He was doing fiddly, complicated stuff before the technology was all the way to being able to capture it. He created a frame that made blue eyes more visible on the film stock used in the ’20s. He used deep focus ten years before Citizen Kane, and if the best way to get a shot was to go in on roller skates, that was just what Howe did.

Oh, a career as lengthy as his will inevitably include a few turkeys, especially given he worked during the studio era and didn’t always get to choose what he worked on. But he shot The Thin Man and Manhattan Melodrama, The Prisoner of Zenda and Yankee Doodle Dandy, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House and Bell Book and Candle. There are not a lot of people whose IMDb pages include things they said about John Frankenheimer, Humphrey Bogart, and Greta Garbo, but there he is. And if he didn’t do as much during the war as the US citizens were allowed to do, well, he still put in effort to do what he could.