I have found a great website called: wwww.notcoming.com which details all the title credits Saul Bass created or was credited to. Below are the different analyses for all of these credits. I know technically this isn't information regarding 'film posters' but Saul Bass is one of the best designers of all time and I think this shows how you can expand on flat, 2D design. However just to provide some info on posters I have shown the poster for each one which Bass also created. There are quite a few and it is obviously text heavy but if you are a fan of Bass' work, which many people are, then the information put across is very interesting. More often than not information about the film itself is also broadcast which when read helps place the credits Saul created in better context. Below are all the titles that Bass designed for the film maker Otto Preminger.
Carmen Jones, 1954:
Saul Bass’ first set of film titles was also the first of many projects for independent director-producer Otto Preminger, initiating a collaboration that would last for twenty-five years and a dozen films. For Carmen Jones, as he would for so many of Preminger’s films, Bass created a distinctive, iconic image by which the film would be instantly recognizable. The single, line-drawn image of a rose engulfed in a red, snaking flame echoes the red skirt of Carmen Jones, the rose between her teeth, and the destructive passions she arouses in Joe, the hapless young military officer.
The film itself is cited as a landmark film because of its all-black cast (its star, Dorothy Dandridge, was the first African-American woman to receive an Oscar nomination for a lead role) and Oscar Hammerstein’s reinvention of Bizet opera in African-American vernacular. Of course, given the film’s vintage, the film is as prickly and perhaps ill-considered as the original idea implies and, like its source material, is encoded with suspect notions about the evil, seductive powers of the black woman. Upon its release, James Baldwin famously lambasted the film for its parsing of stereotypes of light- and dark-skinned blacks. And enlivened as it is by Dorothy Dandridge’s scorching onscreen presence (revived in Preminger’s adaptation of Porgy and Bess five years later), the film nonetheless dispenses with the vocal talents of most of its performers in favor of those of “classically trained” (and often white) singers. As Jeff Smith has reported in his revealing essay on the film, Preminger and his producers seem to have equivocated on whether Dandridge and Harry Belafonte – though seasoned performers in the cabaret and calypso worlds, respectively – were up to the task of performing in the putatively superior musical form of opera.
The Man with the Golden Arm, 1955:
A sanguine courier of controversy, Otto Preminger shirked the Production Code seal of approval for his 1955 account of a drug addict’s plight, The Man With the Golden Arm. And while many tales of drug addiction have followed in its wake, Preminger’s film is a clear watershed. Though obviously dated in some of its aspects, its scenes of Frank Sinatra, as the eponymous doper, falling on and off the wagon remain chilling and continue to inform contemporary films with the same subject matter.
Bass’ titles for the film feature spiny, cut-out projectiles, vaguely redolent of veins and syringes, that manages to be disconcerting despite the accompaniment of Elmer Bernstein’s rather brassy jazz score. The lines proliferate and jab at awkward, unsettling angles with respect to the titles. And the title of the film is seemingly penned in by four of these lines, suggesting the many forces hemming in Sinatra’s Frankie from all sides. Finally, privileging Preminger’s credit, the titular “golden arm” (which actually refers to Frankie’s prowess as a card dealer and not the location of his track-marks) appears as a bent and tortured appendage, reaching out for either redemption or a fix.
Bonjour Tristesse, 1958:
Having cast aside the more minimalist aesthetic of his early title sequences for the manic abundance of his Around the World in Eighty Days titles, Bass seems to have continued his experimentations with more formally complex title sequences with his next two Preminger collaborations. Retaining his signature cut-out imagery, Bass integrates different transitions and dissolves, creating a palimpsest of bells for Saint Joan and a tapestry of flowers, shells, and raindrops for Bonjour Tristesse.
Both films are literary adaptations, debuting Jean Seberg in a pair of somewhat improbable roles as French women. And though the films achieve only mixed results, both feature interesting formal experimentation concurrent with Bass’ own efforts in the title sequences. While Saint Joan is more notable for its script (adapted by Graham Greene from George Bernard Shaw’s play) than for any visual innovation, Bonjour Tristesse showcases Preminger’s widescreen compositional sense and the agility of his trademark tracking shots. It also displays his mastery of both black-and-white and Technicolor palettes, as the film moves from the monochrome present-day of Seberg’s disaffected Parisian socialite to the vibrant lustiness of her Mediterranean youth.
Bass’ opening credits suggest the arc of Francoise Sagan’s story, with colorful abstractions of shells and coral that dissolve into stars and flowers. Finally, these flowers’ petals become raindrops and then – in the image that brands the film – tears. The themes of passion, metamorphosis, sexual awakening, and melancholy that mark the progress of the film all find resonance in these titles. Artfully, Preminger follows Bass’ credits with images of the black-and-white, present-day Paris, removing his audience from an abstract, colorful evocation of youth and into an already harsh and effete reality.
Anatomy of a Murder, 1959:
By 1959, Saul Bass had become an integral part of Preminger’s production team and his title designs an important element of the pitching and marketing of the director’s films. Bass’ designs for Anatomy of a Murder were devised long before cameras began to roll, making clear the value that Preminger placed on Bass’ work and its role in positioning and branding his films.
The titles for the film are among Bass’ most recognizable and, along with Duke Ellington’s score, lend the film its particular blend of sophistication and loose, improvisatory charm. Literalizing the film’s title, the credit sequence presents different cut-out (-off?) human limbs, which are in turn diced up into abstract decorative shapes. Echoing the deliberate manner in which the film dissects the circumstances of a murder case, the credits also provide some witty juxtapositions of titles and images: James Stewart naturally gets the head; Lee Remmick a leg; Duke an arm; and Preminger’s credit comes once a disembodied hand seems to cover the lens. The central image of the segmented corpse is so effective and simple that Spike Lee’s production company lifted it wholesale for the film, Clockers, until Bass threatened them with a lawsuit.
True to Preminger’s appetite for provocation, Anatomy of a Murder is renowned for its use of some hitherto taboo words (ahem, panties) and its adoption of outré subjects such as rape and the insanity defense. But unlike some of his other notably controversial works, Anatomy of a Murder feels neither forced nor dated in its use of provocative subject matter. It is both a tightly constructed courtroom drama and an engaging ensemble character study, and like James Stewart’s rumpled Michigan lawyer, it remains at once clever and down-to-earth.
Exodus, 1960:
As Otto Preminger’s films grew in scope (and length) in the late 1950s and early ’60s, Saul Bass’ titles became important factors in distinguishing the films from the other Hollywood epics of the time. For 1960’s Exodus, one of Preminger’s most exhausting and bombastic films, Bass opted for a simple image, one that encapsulates the protagonists’ struggle for the nation of Israel in a manner that is perhaps more effective than the rest of the film.
Similar to the iconic credit sequence that Bass had created for Carmen Jones six years earlier, the central image is one of fire, though here it symbolizes nationalist fervor rather than lusty passion. In the midst of this flame is the central cut-out image of arms reaching up – in defiance, in struggle – against a backdrop of the rich, Mediterranean blue of the Israeli flag. As a result, the title sequence seems like something of a regression for Bass, returning him to the minimalism of his earliest credit sequences. But in its elegance and lack of presumption, this minimalism contrasts neatly with the massive, star-stuffed scale of the film’s narrative.
Advise and Consent, 1962:
Otto Preminger’s polemic of American government and law opens with a crude illustration of the US Capitol. Its dome is unhinged, displaying the film’s title with the playful interactivity of a cookie jar. The analogy lampoons the political iconography, equating it with the mundane functionality of a household object.
The credits appear in hand-drawn, cursive writing (Bass’ own), over cropped footage of an American flag bellowing in a slow-motion current against an empty, black background. The flag is robbed of its iconography. Perhaps enforced by the film stock, the color red is absent – no bloodshed – but more discrete is the absence of the flag's upper-left corner. The flag’s stars are omitted: no icons of unity to warrant the prize of liberty.
The Cardinal, 1963:
In the opening frames of The Cardinal, with the sound of a bell ringing over a Roman square on the soundtrack, a black-robed, stone-faced clergyman exits a church and walks through a maze of cloisters, colonnades, and crumbling architecture. The title sequence is composed entirely of live-action images (with the exception of the characteristically Bass-ian typeface), but like Bass’ most richly animated title sequences, it functions to suggest the style and course of the film in graphical terms.
The cardinal strides into and out of an elaborate series of frames – up staircases and across ornate piazzas – in a manner that prefigures the character’s professional course from a small Boston parish to the Vatican. Through a series of dissolves, the juxtaposition of staircases and Doric columns creates a tense network of competing horizontal, vertical, diagonal lines. This geometrical clash in the credit sequence is evocative of the knotty moral dilemmas that the protagonist will face in the rest of the film.
Indeed, Preminger’s film is very much a stroll through the problems of being a Catholic. Like the credits, the film itself is rather confusing and all over the place. While the film is another of the director’s controversial message-films, Preminger resists the temptation to being wholly scathing (as in similar of his films, he never quite shows his hand). Nevertheless it exploits every available moral issue to hand: interfaith romance, abortion, Southern cross-burning, Nazis, etc. But as always in Preminger’s work, the film is spared by the surprising richness of the characters (headed by empty-slate Tom Tryon), which includes John Huston, Ossie Davis, Romy Schneider, and Burgess Meredith.
In Harm's Way, 1965:
Preminger’s take on Pearl Harbor is a surprisingly effective film, and while it was made to coincide with the 20th anniversary of V-E Day, it is not an overly jingoistic affair. Again, the director provides a surfeit of locations, subplots, and minutes of running time, and again there is a glut of characters and big-name actors, but the acting is typically strong, featuring a fairly good, relatively vulnerable performance from John Wayne.
The credit sequence that Saul Bass contributed to this film came at the end of the film (a rather novel idea at the time) with only a single title card at the beginning. As it stands, the end credits fit In Harm’s Way ideally, lending the film the gravitas that it requires without burdening the Duke with overly portentous dialogue. Instead, Bass provides an entire narrative in credits and ocean photography. Backed by the rise and fall of Jerry Goldsmith’s score, Bass’ titles follow the sea’s whims from calm to violent – culminating in a montage of explosions and mushroom clouds – and then to calm again. The imagery is an adequate suggestion of the course of the war after the film’s events, a wordless and objective expression in nature’s terms, and as such, it allows the drama of the film’s characters to resolve itself without any grand history lessons.
Bunny Lake is Missing, 1965:
Released only a few months after In Harm’s Way, Bunny Lake Is Missing is almost its sister film’s antithesis in Preminger’s oeuvre. Neat, concise, and, like some of its characters, tightly wound, the film boasts only a rather small cast and a clever plot device (which, incidentally, seems to have been totally ripped off for this fall’s Flightplan, with Jodie Foster). But even without the elegantly constructed mystery, the film features some excellent character-actor performances from a weary, restrained Larry Olivier, a perverted Noël Coward, and Keir Dullea doing his best Anthony Perkins (to say nothing of a brief, gratuitous appearance by the Zombies). The presence of Dullea (along with the mid-60’s England setting) lends more than a little touch of Kubrick’s creepiness to the film, and the result is an unnerving psychological thriller that, even with Olivier’s kind reassurances at the end, manages to leave a nasty taste in one’s mouth.
Bunny Lake is a film that turns on the destruction of evidence, so Bass’ titles, which feature the tearing away of bits of paper to reveal the credits, precisely fit the film’s themes of concealment and revelation. The central image here – and the icon that helped to market the film – is that which accompanies Preminger’s credit: the shape of a little girl torn out of the black background. With this image, the titles also evoke the darker side of childhood, a sentiment reinforced with the first image of the film proper: the black background of the title sequence is torn away to reveal Dullea walking alone through a garden filled with toys but devoid of children.
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