THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT... SAUL BASS

If we were to ask you to name some of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest collaborators you’d be likely to mention people like James Stewart, Grace Kelly and Cary Grant. However, one person whose name may not slip off the tongue quite as freely as those luminaries is title designer Saul Bass.

Born in New York in 1920, Bass was a keen artist from an early age and found his first film work in Otto Preminger’s urban opera Carmen Jones. The Austrian director asked him to produce the titles for the 1956 film and, at a time when most title designs were mere processions for the cast’s names, Bass produced the iconic image of a single printed rose, wilting in the shadow of a roaring flame.

It proved a sensation, not only looking aesthetically-pleasing, but also clueing the audience into the film's theme of destructive passion. This is what Bass did best, and Preminger was immediately impressed, inviting him back to design the titles for more of his films.

For heroin addiction drama The Man With The Golden Arm, Bass created a staccato-style arm reaching obsessively into the centre of the frame; for romantic melodrama Bonjour Tristesse he produced a solemn, weeping eye and for the groundbreaking Anatomy of a Murder he made a cut-out of a dismantled body.

But Bass didn't just excel at dramas. Comedy capers Ocean’s 11 and It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World showcased his more playful side and so synonymous are the bold, colourful designs of these films with the 1960s that the titles of modern movies such as Paul Schrader's Auto Focus, Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can and Casino Royale have echoed them to evoke their retro milieu.

These complex mini-movie sequences also highlighted Bass’s desire to move into direction himself. But, despite winning an Oscar for his 1968 short Why Man Creates, his ambitions were quelled by the failure of little-seen 1974 killer ant movie Phase IV. Instead, his directorial legacy lives on in the shape of his work with Alfred Hitchcock.

For the auteur’s Vertigo, Bass was called upon to create a dream sequence as well as the titles. Homing in on the film’s themes of fear and obsession, Bass created a claustrophobic nightmare, using multi-coloured spirograph vortexes, black backgrounds and Bernard Hermann's haunting score to lure the audience into the central character's obsession and create an effect just as disorienting as Hitchcock's much-vaunted dolly zoom.

A thrilling sequence for North by Northwest followed, but it wasn’t until 1960 that Bass’s reputation was cemented with his work on Psycho, for which he received his first 'pictoral consultant' credit after storyboarding the infamous shower scene (rumours still abound that he directed it) and designing the minimalist cutting lines of the iconic title sequence.

With gritty realism taking hold of American cinema in the 1970s and the star reigning supreme in the 80s, Bass’s stylish sequences gradually fell out of fashion. He therefore spent his time designing logos for big corporations until he was invited to create the titles for Martin Scorsese‘s Goodfellas, Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence and Casino, the latter using computer technology to capture the neon-lit dystopia of Las Vegas.

Bass died of non-Hodgkins related lymphoma in 1996. His final design was for documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies. It was fitting end for a man who had contributed so much to the subject at hand.