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 Hitchcock 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 Hitchcock.
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.”
- The Saul Bass exhibition is at the Design Museum, SE1 (0870 8339955), from
July 17-Oct 10
Next page: who killed Janet Leigh
()WHO KILLED JANET LEIGH?
A LEGEND HAS evolved that it was Saul Bass rather than Alfred
Hitchcock who directed the infamous shower sequence in Psycho (1960)
with Janet Leigh.
According to Bass: “I was on the set the day the scene was scheduled to be
shot. Hitchcock had me set up the first shot. When it came time to film,
Hitchcock told me, ‘You know what to do, go ahead.’ I swallowed hard and
said ‘Roll camera.’ Hitch sat back in the director’s chair, nodded his
head occasionally and encouraged me.”
Bass was credited for the film’s titles as well as a “pictorial consultant”,
but it seems unlikely that a perfectionist with an ego like Hitchcock’s
would let someone else direct such a scene.
“I was in that shower for seven days,” recalls Leigh, “and, believe you me,
Alfred Hitchcock was right next to his camera for every one of those
70-odd shots.” As for Hilton Green, the assistant director: “There is
not a shot in that movie that I didn’t roll the camera for. And I can
tell you I never rolled the camera for Mr Bass.”
What’s not in doubt is that Bass helped to lay out the storyboards for the
film. Stephen Rebello, the author of Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of
Psycho, points out that the challenge in 1960 was how to suggest
violence and nudity: “Saul Bass came up with the brilliant suggestion of
using bits and pieces of film.”
Bass’s participation may be one of those urban legends, but the sadness is
that he and Hitchcock never worked together again. IJ
