SELECTED BY
CHRISTIAN ANNYAS
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM
DESIGNED BY
SAUL BASS
Before the mid-1950s, most Hollywood movie title cards and opening credits were typographically static. Projectionists only pulled back the curtains to reveal the screen once they’d finished. Then Saul Bass came along with his expressionistic animated title sequences.
His design for The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) has become a landmark in title design and set the bar for what has become an essential popular art. These movies within movies are sometimes as memorable as the films themselves. And designers have been paying homage to—and building on—them ever since.
So novel was this sequence, when the reels of film for The Man with the Golden Arm arrived at U.S. movie theaters in 1955, a note was stuck on the cans: “Projectionists—pull curtain before titles.”
“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,” Bass said about his rationale. “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.”
The influence of the groundbreaking design work of Bass continues today, whether it’s the controversial “homage” in the poster for the Spike Lee film Clockers (1995), the opening titles of Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can (2002), or the more recent torrent of Bass-inspired posters for movies like Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007), Burn after Reading (2008), The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009), and Precious (2009).