In 1955 audiences sitting down to Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm saw something new before the story even began. Instead of names printed over a painted backdrop, white bars slid across a black screen, lined up, broke apart and finally formed a jagged, twisted arm, all to Elmer Bernstein’s jazz score. The same arm sat at the center of the film’s poster. That was the work of Saul Bass, and Saul Bass posters and title sequences went on to change how Hollywood thought about the first and last thing an audience sees of a film.
Who Saul Bass was
Bass was born in the Bronx, New York City, on May 8, 1920. He studied at the Art Students League and then took night classes at Brooklyn College with György Kepes, a designer associated with the Bauhaus-influenced modernism that shaped his thinking. He worked in New York as a commercial artist before moving to Los Angeles, where his early Hollywood work was print advertising, beginning with the boxing film Champion (1949).
His breakthrough came through Preminger. Bass designed both the poster and the title sequence for Carmen Jones (1954), and a year later The Man with the Golden Arm made him famous. For the next forty years he moved between film, corporate design and filmmaking, and from the early 1960s much of his film work was done in partnership with Elaine Bass, whom he married in 1961. She directed and produced title sequences with him, beginning with Spartacus (1960).
He died in Los Angeles on April 25, 1996.
The idea behind Saul Bass posters
Before Bass, the typical Hollywood poster put the stars’ faces front and center, surrounded by scenes, taglines and credits. Bass did the opposite. He looked for one image that could stand for the whole film and then stripped everything else away. Bass described his aim with title sequences in terms that apply just as well to his posters: he tried “to reach for a simple, visual phrase that tells you what the picture is all about and evokes the essence of the story.”
The results share a recognizable vocabulary:
- Cut-paper shapes with ragged edges, as if torn or snipped by hand rather than drawn.
- Flat, limited color, often black, white and one strong accent such as red or orange.
- A single symbol in place of a star portrait: an arm, a spiral, a fragmented body.
- Hand-drawn lettering that matches the roughness of the shapes rather than a clean typeface.
It is a style rooted in European modernism, the same tradition that produced the Soviet and German film posters of the 1920s that I discuss in classic movie posters. Bass brought it into the Hollywood mainstream at a moment when studios were looking for ways to stand out from television.
Posters to know
| Year | Film | Director | What the poster does |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1954 | Carmen Jones | Otto Preminger | His first poster-and-titles package for Preminger |
| 1955 | The Man with the Golden Arm | Otto Preminger | The jagged arm as the whole film in one image |
| 1958 | Vertigo | Alfred Hitchcock | Figures caught in a spiral, the film’s central motif |
| 1959 | Anatomy of a Murder | Otto Preminger | A body silhouette cut into pieces, like evidence |
| 1960 | Exodus | Otto Preminger | A single emblem of arms reaching up through flame |
| 1980 | The Shining | Stanley Kubrick | A late poster, arrived at after many alternate versions |
Bass’s last commissioned film poster, for Schindler’s List (1993), was never used for the film’s release.
One symbol, every medium
What made the Golden Arm campaign so influential was not just the image but the way it was used. The same jagged arm appeared on the poster, in the newspaper advertising and in the moving title sequence, so the film had a single visual identity wherever an audience met it. Today that sounds like ordinary branding. In 1955 it was unusual for a film, and it suited Preminger, who was presenting a story about heroin addiction that the industry’s Production Code office refused to approve. The film was released without the Code’s seal, and its stark, symbolic advertising told audiences to expect something serious and modern rather than a star vehicle.
Preminger kept coming back to Bass, and their collaboration ran through the late 1950s and 1960s. Looking at their posters side by side is a good way to see how flexible the method was: the same cut-paper approach could signal jazz-age melodrama, courtroom suspense or historical epic.
Title sequences: the credits as a short film
Bass’s title work is where his influence is most obvious. Before the mid-1950s, opening credits were usually static cards that audiences barely noticed; a commonly told story has it that some theaters kept their curtains closed until the credits had passed. Bass treated the titles as the film’s overture, a chance to set mood and theme before the first scene.
The Hitchcock trilogy
His three title sequences for Alfred Hitchcock in the late 1950s are the best known. Vertigo (1958) opens on a woman’s face before spiraling patterns, created with the help of the experimental animator John Whitney, bloom out of her eye. North by Northwest (1959) begins with lines that form a grid, which turns into the glass facade of an office building as the credits travel along it. Psycho (1960) cuts the credits into horizontal and vertical bars that slide across the screen, splitting names apart in a way that anticipates the film’s violence. More on those films in Alfred Hitchcock’s films.
Bass was also credited as a pictorial consultant on Psycho, and he later claimed to have directed the shower sequence. That claim was disputed by Janet Leigh and others who were on set. The generally accepted view is that his storyboards had a strong influence on the scene, which Hitchcock followed closely, but that Hitchcock directed it.
Other sequences
- Anatomy of a Murder (1959) extends the poster’s cut-up body into motion, to Duke Ellington’s score.
- Spartacus (1960), the first sequence credited to Elaine Bass as well, builds the titles over sculpted imagery.
- West Side Story (1961) puts the closing credits on walls, doors and signs, as if written by the neighborhood.
- Grand Prix (1966) uses split screens and racing imagery to match the film’s documentary energy.
Directing films
Bass also made films of his own. Why Man Creates, a short about creativity made by Saul and Elaine Bass (sources differ on exactly how the directing credit is shared), won the Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject for 1968. His only feature as director was Phase IV (1974), a science fiction film about intelligent ants, which has since built a modest cult reputation for its strange, patient visuals.
Beyond the movies
Film was only part of Bass’s career. His studio also built corporate identities for large American companies, including airline, telephone and food brands, and several of the trademarks he designed stayed in use for decades. The skills overlapped completely. A good logo, like a good Bass poster, has to compress a complicated organization or story into one shape that can be read instantly, at any size, by people who are not paying attention. Seeing his corporate work alongside his posters makes it clear that he thought of himself as a designer first and a film person second.
The Scorsese years
After a quieter period in feature work, Saul and Elaine Bass returned to title design in a late collaboration with Martin Scorsese, creating the sequences for Goodfellas (1990), Cape Fear (1991), The Age of Innocence (1993) and Casino (1995). The style had evolved, using live-action imagery, color and typography together, but the principle was the same: one strong idea that tells you how to feel before the story starts. Casino‘s opening, with a body falling through flames and neon, is often cited as a summary of his whole approach.
Why Bass still matters
Bass did not invent the designed title sequence or the graphic poster, but he made both normal in Hollywood. Today it is routine for a film’s marketing to be built around a single icon, and for a television series or film to open with a designed sequence that sets its tone. Much of that habit traces back to the decade between Carmen Jones and Grand Prix.
His work also shows how much design depends on restraint. A Saul Bass poster is mostly empty space. The choice of what to leave out is the design.
Where to go next
For the wider history of poster art across six decades, read classic movie posters. For the formats his designs were printed in, see movie poster sizes explained.
