Foreshadowing the Action:
The Cinematic Legacy of Saul Bass
By Edward Larsen Terkelsen

Within the realm of visual communications, the achievements of graphic designer Saul Bass (1920-1996) were particularly varied, but his foremost contribution was in elevating the cinema’s once routine and by-the-numbers opening title sequences into an art form that was perhaps as meriting of regard as the photoplays for which they were designed. Bass’s cinematic collaborations included such renowned figures as Alfred Hitchcock and Martin Scorsese, but he also fashioned a handful of his own short subjects, culminating in Oscar gold for the scintillating Why Man Creates (1968). His thankfully brief flirtation in the mid-70s with directing full-length features was a bust; the short form was where he excelled. Indeed, the titles he designed in Hollywood were mini-films within a film, and his “symbolize and summarize” approach was well suited to the medium. 

Bass’s move to Tinsel Town took place in 1954 when Otto Preminger asked Bass to fashion main titles for the picture Carmen Jones, but it was Bass’s design concept for the director’s next effort The Man With the Golden Arm (1955) that captured enthusiastic nods from the moviegoing public. The movie was a dramatic showcase for Frank Sinatra, but Bass’s artwork for the promotional posters downplayed the actor’s countenance in favor of a boldly drawn, misshapen arm above the title. The simple cutout style illustration of the broken appendage powerfully conveyed the movie’s subject of drug abuse, and the motif was carried over into its opening title sequence. Bold white lines drop into a frame of contrary black, frequently contributing to the construction of various shapes as they are conjoined with other lines. As the credits rise and fall from the screen, the linear shapes convert into the film’s signature mark of the bent arm, and we’re off and running as composer Elmer Bernstein’s disquieting overture reaches its crest. In little more than a minute, Bass effectively communicates the picture’s sense of fragmentation and its depiction of illicit drugs as a force that breaks the protagonist’s life apart. 

The use of heavy lines in the title sequence of The Man with the Golden Arm reappears in Bass’s opening titles for Alfred Hitchcock’s shoestring-budgeted masterpiece Psycho (1960). Bernard Herrmann’s score is complimented with a forceful arrangement of deeply stacked lines (now conversely black against white) which dart in and out of view as quickly as Norman Bates’ knife as he later murders Marion Crane in the film’s endlessly discussed shower sequence. It is rumored that Bass designed a blueprint for that intricately edited scene, but even the Master himself has dismissed such accounts, though Bass was given an additional “pictorial consultant” credit. 

The text in the Psycho title sequence drops in from the top of the screen much like that in The Man With the Golden Arm, but it also zooms in and out of view from the sides of the frame, too. A similar technique is employed for Bass’s title sequence to Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), but the movement of the type is designed to indicate the rushing of cars down a highway. Yet after a clip of a grisly murder is shown, and then capped with the contrasting Tony Bennett number “Rags to Riches,” the criss-crossing motion of the white text begins to suggest not only the manic tempo of the film proper, but also a protagonist whose life is about to spin wildly out of control. 

Bass (and his wife) reunited with Scorsese to lay out the opening titles for Casino (1995), and it proved to be one of the graphic designer’s most majestic and hallucinatory pieces of work, though sadly his last. As the film’s protagonist Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro) is blown up in his Cadillac by a gangster’s bomb, the exalted chorus of Bach’s “Matthaus Passion” fills the soundtrack as Ace tumbles through space, the titles softly moving in and out of view. Ace’s descent takes him through an impossibly vivid collage of Vegas-style neon until he reaches the fires of Hell, a metaphorical trip that beautifully mirrors the character’s downward spiral as the proprietor of a mobbed up casino that is ripped asunder by a gold-digging dame and two-timing partners.  

The silhouette of a tortured man falling through space was an idea Bass explored earlier in a dream sequence he shaped for Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). In that film, Bass used a great deal of animation, particularly enlarging circular shapes that represented the Jimmy Stewart character’s paralyzing fear of heights. It was Bass’s arresting work on Vertigo that led Hitchcock to enlist the artist’s services on later projects such as North by Northwest (1959). 

In the same year, Bass also reunited with Preminger to create a credit montage for Anatomy of a Murder, a cheeky courtroom drama again starring Jimmy Stewart. In a style recalling his work on The Man with the Golden Arm, Bass uses a cutout illustration of a dead body that he proceeds to systematically dissect, placing a dismembered arm next to a credit for this or a hacked-off leg next to a credit for that. The disassembly of the lifeless figure foreshadows the methodical dissection of the film’s murder case by its riotously tenacious protagonist. 

Though Bass’s countless design accomplishments include recognizable logos for corporate giants like AT&T and United Airlines, it is his cinematic legacy that will endure for his title sequences and poster art helped to authorize a picture’s overall tempo.  In recalling Bass’s formidable innovations in title design, Martin Scorsese has said, “His graphic compositions in movement function as a prologue to the movie—setting the tone and foreshadowing the action.”

© Copyright 2008 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.