Old Hollywood
Cinema
1900-1979
Nostalgia is a seductive liar - George Wildman Ball
Stills from Vertigo’s (1958, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) title credits, designed by Saul Bass. Full sequence can be seen here. “My initial thoughts about what a title can do was to set mood and the prime underlying core of the film’s story, to express the story in some metaphorical way. I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it.” -Saul Bass

Stills from Vertigo’s (1958, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) title credits, designed by Saul Bass. Full sequence can be seen here.

“My initial thoughts about what a title can do was to set mood and the prime underlying core of the film’s story, to express the story in some metaphorical way. I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it.”

-Saul Bass

Saul Bass designed title sequence for Grand Prix (1966, dir. John Frankenheimer) (via)

Saul Bass designed title sequence for Grand Prix (1966, dir. John Frankenheimer)

(via)

Saul Bass designed title sequence from Spartacus (1960, dir. Stanley Kubrick)

“What we were going for in the Spartacus titles was the multiple layers of elegant & disdainful faces, which express the duality of Roman rule -the oppressiveness and the brutality, as well as the sophistication that made possible so many contributions to Western civilization. It seems very rich to see the growth of those profiles forming a full face, & full faces dissolving into profiles before the final face starts to crack apart and the camera zooms into the empty eye, signaling all is not well.”

-Saul Bass, via

Poster art: Saul Bass edition

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Storyboards for the opening sequence of West Side Story (1961, dir. Robert Wise & Jerome Robbins) Sketches by Saul & Elaine Bass (via)

Saul Bass designed title sequence for Walk on the Wild Side (1962, dir. Edward Dmytryk) (via)

Steven Spielberg remembers the “profound impression” made upon him as a 16-yr-old by the titles for Walk on the Wild Side. He recalls, ”I attempted to mimic Mr. Bass, using an 8mm camera and my dog on a leash walking along the narrow retaining wall outside my home in Scottsdale, Arizona. In trying to make my own movie…I made a foul error. I used a dog because we didn’t have a cat.  And as everyone knows, dogs are somewhat less sure-footed than felines. 

My cocker spaniel, Thunder, kept falling off the wall just as he got to the writer credit, did a tremendous pratfall on the producer credit, his legs went out from under him, and I got out of the titles business for good.”

-excerpted from Saul Bass: A Life In Film And Design