With a few notable exceptions, the elaborate main title sequence has gone the way of the drive-in double feature. In fact, many of today’s movies eschew opening credits altogether, opting to plunge the audience directly into the experience and saving the who-did-whats for last. There’s something to be said for that, but we feel a vital part of the moviegoing experience is being neglected, whether it’s the establishment of tone or mood, or just a playful visual riff on the film’s themes. Join us now for a journey of sight and sound we like to call The Twelve Greatest Opening Credits in Movie History.
PSYCHO (1960)
If you only know the name of one title designer- and chances are you do- the designer would almost certainly be Saul Bass. Before Bass came on the scene, the opening titles of films were mostly utilitarian, occasionally interesting to look at but primarily a way to honor the studio's obligations to the principal cast and crew. But this began to change after Bass was hired by Otto Preminger to design the opening credits to The Man With the Golden Arm, with his cutout-style animation working in tandem with Elmer Bernstein's score to create a title sequence that's arguably as good as the film that follows. Bass went on to work with Preminger numerous times, as well as filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, Robert Aldrich, John Frankenheimer, Robert Wise, and later, Martin Scorsese. But for our money, Bass was never better than when designing titles for Alfred Hitchcock, which he did on three occasions. Any of these (the other two being Vertigo and North by Northwest) would be a worthy entry for this list, but we're going with their final collaboration, 1960's Psycho. For one thing, it's the most deceptively simple of Bass' classic output, with little more than white titles on a black background occasionally shoved aside by grey bars. A perfect rhythmic match to Bernard Herrmann's legendary score, Bass' titles are a classic case of "less is more"- a more complex animation might have given the game away, but Bass preserves the mystery of what is to come while still managing to set the tone for the film before we even see a frame shot by Hitchcock. And this was Bass' greatest breakthrough, to take what was once considered an overture to the feature film and turn it into an organic element of the movie itself.
A HARD DAY'S NIGHT (1964)
Few people involved in the making of A Hard Day's Night had particularly high expectations for its quality. The producers of the film intended it to be a cash-in on Beatlemania, which they then believed would be short-lived, and its potential took a backseat in their minds to that of a tie-in soundtrack album. However, from the legendary opening chord it was clear to audiences that A Hard Day's Night was much more than a quickie B-movie. Somehow, director Richard Lester had taken the budgetary limits that were placed on him by the money men and flipped them around to his aesthetic advantage. Except for the priceless comic dialogue, everything that makes the film great is in evidence during the opening credits. The black-and-white camera work, intended as a cost-cutting measure, gives the film a scruffy documentary feel, never more so than during the opening titles when the Beatles are mobbed and chased through the streets by actual fans. The sense of humor that permeates the film makes multiple appearances here, as when band manager Norm, for no good reason, struggles with a container of milk. But the most revolutionary element of these credits is the way Lester and editor John Jympson cut the sequence to the rhythm of the title tune, creating an early ancestor to the modern-day music video. As much as they (and the film itself, for that matter) have been imitated and parodied since its release, the original titles for A Hard Day's Night still elicit the same amount of infectious glee they did more than four decades ago.
GOLDFINGER (1964)
The Screengrab legal department has informed us that the inclusion of at least one James Bond title sequence is mandatory on a list such as this, and after careful consideration, we realized there was really only one choice. First of all, Shirley Bassey’s rendition of the title track is clearly the greatest of all 007 theme songs, despite what you Duran Duran fans think. Secondly, although Maurice Binder is justly praised for his many groovy Bond openings, it was graphic designer Robert Brownjohn who established the template of projecting images from the film onto the semi-nude bodies of lovely young ladies, an achievement we rank just below the discovery of the polio vaccine. In this case, of course, those semi-nude bodies are tinted gold, the crowning touch that pushes this one over the top.
DR. STRANGELOVE (1964)
Some observers, looking on Stanley Kubrick's body of work, have concluded that the man who made HAL 9000 a movie star must have been a misanthrope. But maybe it was just that he loved machines so much that he had little affection left over to bestow on human beings. Consider Dr. Strangelove, a film in which there is no trace of romance and little human warmth, and in which sex is a mysterious offscreen force that makes men in the war room snigger in anticipation of post-apocalyptic orgies and that compels the director to show us George C. Scott in open shirt and shorts. But then there is, at the very opening, that entrancing aerial ballet, with the military jets appearing to get it on, while music that suggests a romantic ballad is heard accompanying the credits. In its way, it may be the last real love scene that Kubrick ever shot. In his final film, Eyes Wide Shut, he tried to generate the same kind of heat with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman standing in for the airplanes, and the fact that he was not fully successful may prove that Scientologists are partly human after all. Or maybe it just proves that there are machines and then there are machines.
THE WILD BUNCH (1969)
Early in Sam Peckinpah's bloody Western masterpiece, there is a sequence, involving a shoot out between two factions (the outlaw gang of the title and the equally heedless, heartless "law men" on their trail) that lays waste to the town's main street, that (among other things) serves notice to the audience that this is not your father's cowboy movie. In order to minimize the number of paying customers who died of massive coronaries during the film's first fifteen minutes, it behooved Peckinpah and his collaborators to prepare viewers as best they could by making with the ominousness. This sequence--with the credits flashing onscreen as the images of the Bunch making their way into town keep freezing and turning to black and white, like cloud formations designed to signal that anyone who sees them had best build themselves an ark--do the trick nicely. No small degree of credit should go to Jerry Fielding, whose music sets a tone both lyrically elegaic and deeply scary. And the concluding freeze frame of William Holden declaiming the line, "If they move--kill 'em!" as that leading candidate for most beautiful four-word phrase in the English language, "Directed by Sam Peckinpah", appears alongside his head, is both a great in-joke and a heartening declaration of personal responsibility on the part of the artist.
SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE (1978)
“You will believe a man can fly,” said the famous tagline of Hollywood’s first big-budget superhero movie. We didn’t, quite – the movie had innumerable problems, and while it set a precedent for movies based on comic books to be profitable and even worth watching, it should be remembered more for being the first than anything like the best. But if there was one moment when it reached perfection, it was its opening credit sequence. A testament to the power of simplicity, the credits beautifully conjured the eternal four-color appeal of comic books by giving us nothing more or less than a simple backdrop of stars (occasionally broken up by something – a nebula? A muscled arm? A fluttering cape?) and the cast and crew of the movie rushing past us in a glorious and understated conjuration of classic comic book cover design. Having already brought together the perfect visual elements, the filmmakers go us one better – and cement Superman’s status as having one of the great credit sequences of all time – by hiring John Towner Williams to produce what is arguably his finest main theme. Williams’ compositions are all too often obvious and overbearing, but here, the triumphant but never aggressive or clamorous tone of the Superman theme fit the mood perfectly. Williams, despite having one of the most storied careers of any film composer, never again managed to so quite so exactly capture the feel of a film in its main title; Hollywood legend has it that, upon hearing it for the first time, producer Alexander Salkind bellowed to him “You’ve saved my movie!”
- Paul Clark, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce
Read Part 2 of this feature