Before Saul Bass showed up, movies started the way your grandfather’s funeral did, dignified, respectful, boring as hell. You sat there while names scrolled past like credits on a tax form, waiting for the actual movie to kick in, and that was supposed to be enough. That was the deal.
Bass walked into that temple of commercial filmmaking, after spending years making gas stations look iconic, and said, “What if these sixty seconds of contractual obligation could make you feel something? What if they could unsettle you, seduce you, prepare you for what’s coming like the opening chords of ‘Gimme Shelter‘?”
The Man with the Golden Arm wasn’t just a title sequence. It was a visual overdose, a graphic panic attack, that fractured, twitching arm wasn’t decorating the credits, it was screaming the movie’s entire thesis statement before a single frame of narrative even rolled. This was 1955, when Eisenhower was president and everyone was supposed to be comfortable and complacent, and here’s Bass serving up heroin addiction as abstract expressionism, making you complicit before you even knew what you were watching.
And he kept doing it. Kept refusing to let those opening minutes be throwaway real estate. The deconstructed body parts in Anatomy of a Murder, pure Basquiat-before-Basquiat brutalism. That swooping, vertiginous plunge into New York in West Side Story that made you feel the city’s violent poetry in your gut. The prowling cat in Walk on the Wild Side moving like sex and danger incarnate through simple white titles.
But the Around the World in 80 Days move? That was pure audacity, creating a twenty-minute short film and sticking it at the end like a fuck-you to convention, like he was saying “I’ll tell you when the movie’s over.” That’s not craftsmanship. That’s revolution disguised as graphic design.
Bass understood what the suits never did: those opening moments aren’t just names on a screen. They’re the ritual, the ceremony, the moment when you stop being you and start becoming the audience. He turned utility into poetry, commerce into art, and he did it with a straight face while everyone else was still figuring out what the hell just happened.