TO GET TO know Saul Bass, you have to roll his credits. He’s the man behind such memorable poster images as the jagged arm for The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) and those unsettling opening titles for Psycho (1960), with its horizontal and vertical forms slicing up the screen.
Bass is the man who turned bland credits into expressive prologues and epilogues. His achievement is justly being celebrated at the Design Museum in London this month.
Movie titles have, of course, been evolving as long as the movies themselves. The elegantly lettered billboards of the silent era gave way to frillier devices: the cast list before and after; the gloved hand leafing though the pages of a book; the engraved invitation.
Neon credits flashed on the skyscrapers in My Man Godfrey (1936). Preston Sturges came up with a curling snake for his 1941 comedy The Lady Eve, one of the earliest animated title sequences. But fundamentally titles didn’t change. Then came Bass. Born in New York City in 1920, he studied graphic design under the Bauhaus-influenced designer Gyorgy Kepes and worked as a commercial artist in New York before moving to Los Angeles in 1946. By the early 1950s, he was being consulted on posters for movies.
That’s how he met the director Otto Preminger, for whom he created the leitmotiv for the advertising, trailer and titles of Carmen Jones (1954); his rose symbol showed that movie art could contain an image that both evoked and defined the film itself.
His work on the film gives an idea of his painstaking imagination. Unable to get a good image of a fluttering candle, long before computers could help, he shot a carefully lit, dripping tap and played around with the speed: the inverted result gave him what he wanted.
For Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm, starring Frank Sinatra as a junkie poker-dealer, Bass broke the mould, animating the jagged arm poster image to a jazz accompaniment for the opening. For Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959), Bass’s much imitated murder-scene chalk outline of a corpse danced to a Duke Ellington score.
Other directors were quick to employ Bass. For Billy Wilder he designed The Seven Year Itch (1955) — in which the T in itch scratched itself — and West Side Story (1961) — the titles as graffiti. The poster art for Around the World in Eighty Days (1956) was turned into a concluding cartoon that deliriously reiterated the plot.
Bass’s style was reminiscent of 1920s Soviet poster art — unapologetically symbolic and powerfully sloganeering. He had a knack for distilling imagery to its essential elements: the flower petal in the opening sequence to Bonjour Tristesse (1957), which eventually transforms into a teardrop, the burning screen of Exodus (1960), the stalking cat from Walk on the Wild Side (1962). They all raised the audience expectations beyond what the films could deliver.
Bass found his professional soulmate in Alfred Hitchco*ck who himself had started out as a graphic designer and liked to envisage every shot of the film long before filming began.
It was as if director and designer thought as one. Watch the cleverness of Bass’s titles for Hitch: beautiful vortices and whirlpools that will figure in the central character’s nightmare in Vertigo (1958); the lines of a graph that transform into the side of a skyscraper, reflecting the movement of cars on a city street, in North by Northwest (1959).
Bass was also hired to assist in the visual dynamics of Janet Leigh’s shower murder in Psycho. Sadly it was his last collaboration with Hitchco*ck.
Bass stayed loyal to Preminger, despite the director’s failing creativity. He advised Stanley Kubrick on the battle scenes in Spartacus (1960). He created striking racing montages for John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix (1966). By the 1970s, though, movie titles had become squeezed so that they could fit on the TV screen, and Bass and his wife Elaine moved back to commercial art.
They created logos and promotional material for such companies as United Airlines, Minolta and Exxon. Creating such corporate identities, Bass said, was “like designing a postage stamp or engraving your autobiography on the head of a pin”.
The couple did some TV commercials and short films. Bass directed the sci-fi movie Phase IV (1974) but, unsurprisingly, only the opening titles grabbed you.
It wasn’t until the late 1980s that “Saul and Elaine Bass” became a movie credit again — Broadcast News (1987), Big (1988) and The War of the Roses (1989), in which what seem to be satin sheets turn out to be a handkerchief into which Danny DeVito blows his nose.
The Bass look last appeared on screen in the opening credits for such Martin Scorsese films as Cape Fear (1991), with its threatening patterns of light on disturbed water, and The Age of Innocence (1993), with its beautiful but menacing roses.
Saul Bass died in 1996, but his influence can be seen in everything from the black-and-white puppet strings of The Godfather poster to the candy-coloured animation for Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can (2002), a Bass poster come to life.
His aim, “to express the story in some metaphorical way”, has since guided the work of Pablo Ferro, whose titles include Dr Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange and L. A. Confidential. He and Bass had few notable competitors until Kyle Cooper caused a stir with his scratchy, jump-cutty credits for Seven (1995), which looked as if they were designed by the film’s serial killer himself.
Bass would have approved of such an adventurous spirit. As he once observed: “It’s nice having had a rewarding past, but the future is what really turns me on.”
