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Saul Bass in 1975
photo & text by Simón Cherpitel
Saul Bass's flaming rose image for Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones set a new look for movie title designs in 1954. In 1956, his jagged arm and bars design for The Man with the Golden Arm also by Preminger revolutionized film marketing graphics, and every succeeding Preminger film carried Bass's distinctive design mark, as shown here: Bonjour Tristesse, Advise & Consent, Bunny Lake Is Missing, Exodus, The Human Factor, In Harm's Way, Saint Joan, Such Good Friends and perhaps his most famous, the dissected body graphic for Anatomy of a Murder.
Besides Preminger, Bass created outstanding moving titles for Alfred Hitchcock in Vertigo, North by Northwest and Psycho, for which he also story-boarded the famous shower scene.
Stanley Kubrick used his services for Spartacus and The Shining; John Frankenheimer for his Young Stranger debut film, then Birdman of Alcatraz, Grand Prix & Seconds; Stanley Kramer for The Pride & the Passion and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World; Robert Wise for West Side Story; William Wyler for The Big Country; Billy Wilder for The 7 Year Itch, Love in the Afternoon and One, Two, Three.
Critics said Saul's opening titles of a prowling black cat for Walk on the Wild Side were better than the movie they introduced. He condensed all of Around the World in 80 Days into a five minute epilogue. In later years, some of Saul's finest works were the contrastingly amorphously flowing and minimalistic titles for Martin Scorsese's Goodfellows, Age of Innocence, Cape Fear and Casino.
He won an Oscar for his short subject Why Man Creates in 1968, yet his one directed feature film, Phase IV (1973) was a failure. He died in 1996. Some of his designs may outlast their films, but since 1982, Vertigo has been listed as a top 10 film of all time by the Sight & Sound survey of international critics and directors. Saul Bass continues to inspire designers regardless of age.
Here are links to
several excellent Web sites
that cover the life and work
of Saul Bass in more detail.
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