By Wagstaff
You’ve gotten your popcorn and taken your seat. Your cell phone is turned OFF. You settle back as the house lights finally dim after 20 minutes of trailers. The production logos vanish and so the opening credits begin. Sometimes this is the best part of a movie. The mood is set – a world of possibility opens up and nothing has come afterwards yet to muck it up. The title sequence acts as a decompression chamber – a transitional portal to another time and place. Some of the best title sequences could work as short films in their own right.
Up until 1950 or so, there were no opening credit sequences per se. The backgrounds and lettering might change, but the format was by and large standard. Then, in 1955, something new happened. Otto Preminger hired New York graphic artist Saul Bass to design the titles for The Man with the Golden Arm. The animated cutouts that Bass set to Elmer Bernstein’s music were influential. Preminger instructed movie projectionists to open the curtains before the credits started, something they weren't in the habit of doing, and the results changed movies forever.
So, without further ado, let the curtains open for five of my favorites – and then on to yours.
1. The Age of Innocence (1993)
Saul Bass was the undisputed king of title design. A graphic designer from the world of New York advertising, he designed some of Alfred Hitchcock’s grandest titles: Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho. He worked with directors as diverse as Otto Preminger, Martin Scorsese, Billy Wilder, Robert Wise, Stanley Kubrick, Stanley Kramer, and John Frankenheimer. Click here and scroll down to see some of his most famous corporate logos. Saul’s work with wife Elaine for Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence ranks among his finest. More than just an intro, it’s an integral part of the film. The submerged passions of Edith Wharton’s novel are literalized up front. Through a veil of lace and Wharton’s handwriting, succeeding images of flowers are shown blooming in time-lapse, each one dissolving into the next. Set to Gounod’s music for Faust, red hibiscus blooms (representing delicate beauty and 
love, according to the Victorian language of flowers) give way to yellow hibiscus (dying love, platonic love, and infidelity). It’s beautiful and outrageously sexual – almost scandalous. The blooms increase in tempo, until the romantic rhythm reaches an orgasmic crescendo and we see a yellow flower open repeatedly, spreading its petals over and over and revealing its pistil. Finally, a volcanic eruption of red petals peels back and dissolves into the hemisphere of a dandelion (faithfulness, happiness, and wishes come true). It’s the most daring and sexually explicit scene in The Age of Innocence – a movie about Protestants made by a man with Catholic appetites.
2. Dr. No (1962)
A white dot moves from left to right across a black screen. It expands into a rifled gun barrel. We look down the barrel, taking aim at a well-dressed man walking left. We are about to pull the trigger, but he gets the jump on us, whirls and fires his Walther PPK. Blood cascades down before our eyes as the white dot begins to shimmy back and forth to Monty Norman’s jazzy “James Bond Theme”. What just happened here? It’s assassin vs. assassin. We went from voyeuristic aggressor to ecstatic victim in only a few seconds. The rest of Dr. No’s credits are a cacophony of flashing, dancing dots, and a riot of 60’s color that is reminiscent of the opening credits of TV’s Lost in Space. The dots give way to superimposed Jamaicans dancing the limbo, and then as the music segues into a calypso reworking of “Three Blind Mice," we see silhouettes of the three blind assassins with walking sticks tapping across a blue and red, purple and orange, nebulous void.
Maurice Binder, who once partnered with Saul Bass, created the credits for 14 Bond films. His style, ranging across decades, is filled with brassy belly-dancers and silky nude silhouettes shot out of a gun; it is humorous and sexy at the same time, and instantly recognizable the world over. Binder took a break from the next two Bond pictures, but came back for Thunderball, but not before the second Bond film, From Russia with Love, initiated a new device that’s been copied by television shows ever after: the pre-credit sequence.
3. The Pink Panther (1963)
Cue Henry Mancini’s immortal “Pink Panther Theme” (dead ant, dead ant.) Enter the Pink Panther, not the titular diamond with a small flaw shaped like an animal that the movie is actually about, but Friz Freleng’s irrepressible creation, an animated panther that would frame the rest of the series and go on to have a cartoon career of his own, one that kept Freleng going after his years at Warner Brothers. This is the one that put cartoon credit sequences on the map. It’s my tribute to all those cartoon titles that were in vogue in the 60’s like Bell, Book, and Candle and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, as well as retro-60’s titles like the ones for Andrew Bergman’s Honeymoon in Vegas. The 
Pink Panther rearranges names from anagrams. He purrs up against Capucine’s name. He ogles Claudia Cardinale’s name. He wears a monocle and smokes a cigarette from a holder. He gives himself credit where credit isn’t due. He mocks and cajoles various technicians. He gets chased around by Inspector Clouseau (look up bumbling in the dictionary) and leaves pink paw prints everywhere. He entertains us while the names go flashing by. And all the while, Mancini’s music keeps playing…
4. Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Last I heard, this 10 minute credit sequence for Leone’s epic western still held the record as the longest. In fact, everything about this masterpiece is long, even the title in Italian (C’era una Volta il West) isn’t much shorter. These credits take their time getting done. Welcome to the world of Sergio Leone, where the slightest action – a facial tic, a sideways look – is amplified and writ large. Leone took Fred Zinnemann’s classic opening for High Noon, turned it inside out, and then inflated it to near bursting.
Three gunslingers in long dusters descend on a quiet Arizona railway station in the middle of nowhere. There’s no Ennio Morricone score yet, just the symphonic, complexly orchestrated sound effects: a creaky door, wind, chalk on a board, a bird in a cage, a rooster and some chickens, and always, throughout, a squeaking windmill. After dispatching with the old stationmaster, and sending an Indian woman packing, they find out the train is two hours late. And so they wait. The three killers spread out across the deserted station, as the empty tracks spread out across the desert. Woody Strode (Stony) walks with slow, purposeful, spur-
clinking steps across the rough hewn, impossibly immense loading platform to stand underneath a water tower. Al Mulock (Knuckles) dips his hand in a water trough. Jack Elam (Snaky) yanks out the wires of a clicking telegraph machine (killing the soundtrack momentarily) and then tries to take a nap. A drip of water lands on Stony’s bald head. He puts on his hat to catch the falling drops. Snaky’s nap is thwarted by a buzzing fly. Knuckles cracks his knuckles …loudly. Snaky catches the fly in the barrel of his gun. A train’s whistle is heard in the distance. The men listen. Stony slowly removes his hat, and drinks the water it has collected. The train approaches as Stony cocks his sawed-off repeating rifle, and the three bad men get ready for a confrontation.
All this happens without dialogue; in a western that somebody once described as an opera in which the arias weren’t sung, but stared. Leone’s genius for the tactile textures that film is sometimes capable of is evident throughout. Whiskey bottles look dank and dusty; guns look heavy; clothing appears thickly woven and layered; faces in closeup look as craggy and pockmarked as Monument Valley. The beginning credit sequence of Once Upon a Time in the West is the most self-consciously comical part of the movie, but it sets the immense stage for what follows: a complete triumph of style over content.
5. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
“Loving care” is the phrase that comes to mind when I think of this title sequence. I find it the most emotionally powerful scene in To Kill a Mockingbird. Elmer Bernstein’s music swells with retrospective innocence and helps things along as we watch the hands of a little girl (Scout’s) opening her cigar box of keepsakes and taking them out to play. Extreme closeups of the objects within make them look like architecture; it's as if title designer Stephen Frankfurt made a miniature camera and got a miniature crew to operate it. As Scout uses her crayons to draw and color a mockingbird, Russell Harlan's exquisite black-and-white photography, through slow loving pans and bittersweet 
dissolves, shows us a fountain pen, figures of a boy and a girl carved out of soap, a silver whistle, some pennies from 1900, a key, a harmonica, some jacks, one marble rolling up against another, a pair of spectacles, and, of course, Atticus’ watch and chain. Many of the credits are tied to appropriate objects; "music by Elmer Bernstein" is paired with the whistle, for instance. By the end, the girl completes her picture, then tears it. The sequence is suffused with nostalgia; we are already looking back on the story we are about to be told.
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Wagstaff is a contributor to The House Next Door, Liverputty and Edward Copeland on Film.
Friday, November 17, 2006
5 for the Day: Title Sequences
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33 comments:
For the youtube generation...
Dr. No
Latter part of Once Upon a Time in the West
To Kill a Mockingbird
Movie on television wise, nothing is more heartbreaking than seeing the credits of Once Upon A Time In The West on TV, in full 2.35:1 glory for the opening sequence cut to a bitter pan and scan for the duration of the movie. I consistently remember getting ready to park myelf for the 165 minute + runtime, only to turn the television off in disgust.
Five favorites:
1. Vertigo. (1958) Another great Bass title sequence for Hitchcock, taking the viewer into and out of a series of overlapping, geometric, concentric patterns, while Bernard Herrmann's score makes you even dizzier than you were already.
2. Star Wars. (1977) Maybe the most parodied opening title sequence of all time: "A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away," followed by the triumphant opening note of John Williams' score, and the movie title zooming through your head and gradually disappearing into space, making way for the introductory title crawl.
3. Catch Me If You Can. (2002) Very similar in spirit to the Pink Panther-style animated credits, this one has cartoon facsimiles of the identity-stealing hero and his G-man pursuer wandering through tableaus that are linked (a la To Kill a Mockingbird) to the credited person's job description.
4. Apocalypse Now. (1979) Kind of a wild card, but I included it because it's so unique: no opening credits at all, just Capt. Willard's booze-fueled flashback/hallucination of helicopters floating in super slo-mo over jungle landscapes that erupt into napalmed flame. There are no credits at all until the very end of the movie, and in most release prints they were simple white titles on black, backed with a dissonant jungle-inflected synth composition by director Francis Coppola's father, Carmine.
5. Lost in America. (1985) Opening credits over the opening sequence: married couple Julie Hagerty and Albert Brooks snoozing in their bedroom one morning, while the camera pans around their cozy upper-middle-class suburban home and a clock radio plays a bitchy, trivial interview with critic Rex Reed. A nice thumbnail of the life they're about to leave behind.
Se7en immediately sets a disturbing tone with its opening credits. We watch John Doe's bandaged fingers busily writing, hanging photos and soaking a tea bag (a gesture he repeats later in the film when he's in custody). Best is the creepy music playing, which sounds familiar and you can't quite place it until you finally hear Trent Reznor spit out a lyric at the end of the credits.
Five off the top of my head
1. The animated opening to Grease.
2. The windshield wipers clearing the screen of the credits in Blood Simple.
3. The black-and-white slow-motion images of Jake in the ring in Raging Bull (for Marty's birthday today).
4. Call me sentimental, but I still recall fondly the days when the simple white titles on black screen heralding the start of a Woody Allen movie would get me excited.
5. As always, I have to go for the laugh and recall the opening of Airplane! spoofing Jaws, even though most of the credits don't occur until they are in the airport.
What am I thinking -- Wagstaff has been talking about this piece for months and I forgot to mention the one I was definitely going to list: The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
2 favorites of recent vintage:
1) Fargo -- I'll always remember the epic Carter Burwell music playing as Jerry Lundegaard's stolen sedan comes up over the horizon. The audience I was in loved it.
2) Napolean Dynamite -- Perhaps my favorite part of the whole movie, actually. After so many unimaginative opening credit sequences (or ones that despite having all sorts of computer wizardry seemed totatlly divorced in style from the rest of the movie), I just really apprecited the low-tech love invested in this one. Simple, cute, funny, ties in with the story: all in all, great. Plus, it actually manages to make me nostalgic for cafeteria food.
I'm not a total anti-CGI crusader or anything, but whenever a present day filmmaker takes the time to actually shoot a trick or gag (rather than just shoot a backdrop for a computer), it always pays off big time. I suppose that's an entirely seperate subject, so I'll stop...
1. Nothing for me beats the opening of Saturday Night Fever. The disco beat of the Bee Gees, the long tracking shot of Travolta's feet, him going down the street, pestering women, eating pizza two slices at a time, buying a shirt on layaway. Classic.
2. Alien. It's so damned foreboding. It creeps the hell out of you.
3. Once Upon a Time in the West (yeah, hard to ignore that one)
4. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. There aren't many credits at all, really. But it's just enough. As soon as I heard Cate Blanchett speak, "The world has changed..." after the "Wingnut Films" logo disappeared, I said to myself, "This is a great movie already. The next three hours will have to disprove that, not prove it." It measured up.
5. InnerSpace has some great stuff of what looks to be really futuristic crystals and turns out to be ice in a soda glass.
Man, I love the opening to Once Upon A Time in the West. Great call! Two other Westerns with great title sequences: The Wild Bunch, with the kids throwing the scorpion in an antbed and the scenes snapping to sepia-toned shots, and Dead Man, with the train heading west from civilization into the wild.
Seven--yes indeedy. Too bad Kyle Cooper cannibalized it for lesser films (Mimic, Sphere) so many times thereafter.
I love the simple rack-focus titles of Gary Sherman's Raw Meat, beneath which a Magritte-type ventures into the London Underground backed by some stripper music.
Pink Panther wise, I'm partial to The Pink Panther Strikes Again's opening cartoon, in which Clouseau chases Pink through classic cinematic tableaux.
More great Bass/Scorsese: the '91 Cape Fear.
The Saul Bass/Elmer Bernstein credits for "Walk on the Wild Side" with the cat walking/vicious cat fight is one of Bass' best. Too bad the movie is so dull.
This is turning into a Saul Bass lovefest, which is to be expected. He owns the main title sequence (and for that matter, the mid-20th-century movie poster) the way Gregg Toland owns deep focus cinematography.
As Wagstaff remarked in a recent email to me, it's telling that four of his choices fall between 1962-1968, and the top choice is by Bass again, who was at his peak in the 1950s and 60s (though he continued to do strong work for another two-and-a-half decades). And already in this comments thread, a lot of the cited films boast credits that are either strongly influenced by Bass or his contemporaries in the 1960s (who basically had two choices -- pay homage to the master (as I believe the Alien titles do), or actively push in the opposite direction (Seven being maybe the ultimate example, though the Leone title sequences have a taste of that).
What is it about Bass and his heyday -- roughly Eisenhower through Nixon -- that inspired and enabled such inventive graphics?
It's not obviously designed or anything, but I've always found the title sequence for Rosemary's Baby to be sweetly ominous, as all good things should be.
I generally don't like credit sequences and I think, all considering, that Saul Bass /Preminger / Hitchcock were on the wrong track here.
I really do prefer to cut to the chase of the movie and making the title sequences this very drawn-out affair (in some cases they now end more than ten minutes into the movie)plus a pre-title sequence breaks the rhythm for me. I don't really need a sequence of highly engineered (often now overblown) crappy music, animation and a sequence
I have a fondness for the opening titles for both versions of Dawn of the Dead. Romero's original starts with an ominous, abstract crimson field accompanied by a jarring Ligeti-esque chord, which then zooms out to reveal that it's 1970s shag carpeting with our lead actress struggling through a nightmare, only to wake up into the horror that is the collapse of civilization around her. Zack Snyder's more pumped-up version opens with a quick-cut montage of apocalypse imagery but then shifts into Johnny Cash singing "The Man Comes Around". I prefer Romero's deeper commitment to existential dread, but I enjoy Snyder's punk-nihilist end times as well.
Also I'm surprised nobody has yet mentioned Fincher's ride through the brain from Fight Club, which is more fun than the designer malaise of the Seven sequence.
Forgive me if this was posted already. Related link:
http://www.notcoming.com/saulbass/index2.php
Also, Spike's credits for 25th Hour are the best thing about that flick.
I remain surprised at how relatively unheralded Grand Prix is among fans of both Bass and John Frankenheimer. The movie itself is as bloated as they come, but the racing sequences may well be Frankenheimer's finest hour as an action director, and Bass uses them as the basis of several split screen montages (originally presented in Cinerama) that are right up there with his best work (Bass also provided rockin' credits in addition to the montages). Despite the flab, I can't recommend the DVD that came out this summer highly enough--the supplementary docs on the history of Formula 1 racing are engrossing as hell. It's also worth a look to see what an unbelievably hot babe Jessica Walter was 40 years before morphing into Arrested Development's Lucille Bluth.
A really excellent recent credits sequence that no-one has mentioned is Kiss Kiss Bang Bang's from last year. Really ace stuff. And god help me, I'm a big sucker for the illustrated credits sequence encompassing the whole trilogy that ends The Return of the King.
Charade (1963) - another Maurice Binder masterpiece scored by Henry Mancini.
I'm no fan of Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway, but it has a brilliant credit sequence that shows episodes of Steve McQueen's life in prison intercut with him building a house of cards (or is it sticks, I'm going by memory here.)
Edward Copeland wrote:
The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
I cannot count the number of times I've been reading a talkback here, only to see that Copeland has already thrown down the only useful comment I could've contributed.
The rise of inventive opening credits sequences in the 1950s and 1960s parallels the rise of more creative magazine and advertising graphics, and Pop Art, in the same period. [Not that the sweeping GONE WITH THE END credits, among others, weren't wows in their days. I like KING KONG's, too, with the lettering underscored so dramatically by the music.]
End credits sequences are rarer than opening credits ones, but Preminger/Bass again win for best of show: IN HARM'S WAY, with its calm to crashing seas. Amazing to watch in widescreen.
I love the credits for the original King Kong, Robert.
How about the romantic air to air refueling credits for Dr. Strangelove? Or the sepia credits for Chinatown that run up screen?
Wagstaff and Robert: By coincidence, I just watched "King Kong" again last night. My favorite part of the credits was the final acting card: "...AND KING KONG, EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD!"
I remember the audience gasping when they realized that the shadows criss-crossing the screen under the initial credits turned out to be the letters of "THE UNTOUCHABLES." Me too. And, god, I love that Morricone score.
Yes, Once Upon a Time in the West, of course.
The Dawn of the Dead remake and Napoleon Dynamite. They both peak with the opening credits.
Blow Out's cheesy overture-type credit sequence still gives me a chill.
Monsoon Wedding opening titles set the tone.
Just saw Casino Royale, and the credits sequence there, while not worthy of a top five of all-time by any means, is a mostly clever homage to the '60s credit style, complete with floating card suits everywhere.
I think the first hour of THE DEPARTED is pretty much perfect and even though it's jarring, that title card with that stupid-catchy Dropkick Murphy's song raging loud is, simply, kick ass.
I'm surprised nobody said THE NEW WORLD. The first time I saw the movie when they started up I was all, wtf?, New Line, get out the kitchen! After such an audacious, and gorgeous, opening invocation of Mother Earth the titles felt false, forged. But then the Horner score disappeared and the nature sound design came into effect and I began to see the beauty of the maps opening new rivers into the heart of the continent.
Any Godard movie's got great title cards but I dig PIERROT LE FOU's alphabet soup opener the most.
Steve already said it but I'll mention 25th HOUR's opening credits: devastating.
BLOCK PARTY's animated roll call was clever and cute and perfect after that tune-up scene.
oh so many...here's a big wheel of cheese: Goddammit I love the movies.
How could we forget! The New World credits were awesome!
Wagstaff, great idea for a 5 for the day! I like all your choices, though as far as James Bond opening credits are concerned, I'm rather partial to the one that put nipples on the writhing silhouettes. Unlike the Bat Suit, it's appropriate to put nipples on opening credit sequence hotties.
As usual, I digress.
Someone mentioned Spike Lee's 25th Hour earlier, and I think Spike does a great job setting the tone for his films with his opening credits. Take a look at Rosie Perez' chaotic and funky Public Enemy-set boogie in Do the Right Thing, or the rude street signs in Jungle Fever, or the crime scene photos that graphically open Clockers (whose Anatomy of a Murder-style poster caused a lawsuit by our pal, Mr. Bass).
My favorite Spike title sequence opens Crooklyn, a movie that has plenty wrong with it but managed to endear itself to me solely because of its nostalgia factor. Spike scores the titles to the Stylistics' People Make the World Go Round, an almost meta reference to the Universal logo that opens the film. While bright swatches of paint highlight the credits, Spike, his editor Barry Alexander Brown, and his cin-togger Arthur Jafa give us a tour of a Brooklyn neighborhood at play.
Before there was a PS3 or a Nintendo Wii, there was the ancient phenomenon of parents sending the kids outside to play. While the parents (or at least MY parents) did sinister things like create more siblings to torment me, we chose from so many games to occupy the time we spent within the borders of a city block. Spike's camera takes us down that entire block, showing us how far we were allowed to go lest we get in trouble, passing the streetlights that came on to signify when our "asses better be in the house," and pausing long enough to show games I hadn't played in at least a quarter of a century.
Kids run races and play handball against the stoop. Crooklyn's protagonist is "it" during a game of Red Light, Green Light. Girls sing about Miss Mary Mack while boys lay on the ground to pluck milk jug tops filled with street tar during a game of Skellies (I can't believe my anal about dirt self actually used to do that). Grown folks of Hispanic and West Indian descent slap down dominoes and drink Bud, and the camera hovers and spins over kids turning double dutch jumprope, the angle of view giving it an otherworldly majesty.
The scenes of inner-city child's play circa 1973 properly set the stage for me--after all, I was there--and made me a lot more forgiving of the film's sloppiness. In one credits shot, there's even a kid running in the exact same bad 70's colored outfit I have on in one of my least favorite childhood pics.
When I recently watched Crooklyn again (thanks to Mr. Ruediger's generous donation of the Spike Lee Joint collection), my eyes welled up during this opening credits sequence; not because it was touching, but because it was a casual reminder of the downside of nostalgia: It informs you that you are old.
Title sequences are supposed to be foreplay for the movie, setting the tone and the expectation for what's to follow. Lee is one of the few directors working today who understands that purpose.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the exceptionally playful and blackly humorous credits sequence for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (all cannons and close-ups and gunfire). It's like the disreputable cousin to the opening credits of something like The Pink Panther.
The amazing title shot of Mission to Mars, which sends up a rocket that explodes before our eyes into...confetti.
The psychedelic Afrolicious ass-kicking of Pam Grier over the titles of Foxy Brown.
The credits of Kiss Me Deadly, as ass-backwards as the rest of Mike Hammer's world.
The title written on Rudy Ray Moore's cape while he busts his kung-fu moves as The Human Tornado.
The pre-credits sequence of Blissfully Yours, all 45 minutes of it.
The opening of the Royal Tenenbaums is one of my most cherished moments in all of cinema. Seeing that huge, implosive family start on their road to misery, accompanied by Alex Baldwin's narration and a lovely orchestration of Hey Jude, is just sublime.
I realize I'm way late in posting here, but ... BULLITT. The opening credit sequence is posted on YouTube so you can see for your self how mesmerizing it is. The floating images, the sense in the viewer of what-the-hell is going on here, the music -- Lalo Schiffrin -- everything merges perfectly. Adn with that I'm off to youtube to watch it again.
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