This article is the first of a series in which we will explore some of the great film poster designers and artists. When we conceived of the idea to produce this series, the only person to start with was Saul Bass. As well as being the most well-known ‘film poster designer’, Saul Bass is probably also the most influential ‘graphic designer’ to have ever lived. Born in Brooklyn in 1920, while studying design Saul Bass was mentored by the influential Bauhaus theorist György Kepes. Bauhaus has been described as a severe but elegant geometric style carried out with a great economy of means. We think that this description really resonates when considering the work of Saul Bass.
In the late 1940’s, Saul Bass went to work in advertising in L.A. In this ‘Mad Men’ era producing trademarks, logos and letterheads was lucrative work and Bass began to establish a solid career for himself in this field. However, as he strived to produce more creative work the movie industry, firmly based in Los Angeles, became his perfect outlet. In 1955 Elaine Makatura a commercial artist came to work for Saul Bass & Associates as a designer. They were later to marry and they worked together for the remainder of Saul Bass’s career. Elaine’s influence cannot be understated. She is thought to have done the majority of the design work on the prestigious opening credits for the Stanley Kubrick film Spartacus in 1960.
The design of the opening credits for the 1954 Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones was Saul Bass’s first major commission for a Hollywood film. Up until then, opening credits were seen as a functional part of the film. The viewer rarely paid any attention to the credits as they were projected onto the curtains before they were even drawn to show the film. Saul Bass in partnership with directors such as Preminger began to realise the potential of credits as a form of entertainment in their own right. In 1955 the director and artist teamed up again and Saul Bass produced his first film poster for the 1955 film The Man with the Golden Arm.
An original UK Quad poster for the first release of ‘The Man with the Golden Arm’ in the UK.
In typical Saul Bass style, the design gives the audience a set of clues to the complex theme of the film. The movie is a hard-hitting examination of drug addiction, a taboo subject in the 1950s, and the artist uses the distorted arm to reflect the damage addiction inflicts on the human body. This nuanced focus on the arm was a new approach for the promotion of movies which before this had largely revolved around the film star.
In the five years that followed, Saul Bass produced some of his best known and revered work in the film industry. The 1957 film Love in the Afternoon had two of the biggest stars (Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper) in film history but it was Saul Bass’s design that won the day when it came to the film poster. The following year (1958), Saul Bass teamed up with Alfred Hitchcock for the first time to produce the film poster for Vertigo, an image that needs little introduction to film poster lovers. Obsession is the core theme running through this Hitchcock masterpiece and Bass captures this through the brilliant use of the spiral and the colour red. 1959 saw the release of the film Anatomy of a Murder. This film revolves around a murder trial where the evidence doesn’t quite fit together. In the same way, the body parts used in this poster don’t quite sit together properly.
Saul Bass and Elaine continued to produce film titles and posters throughout the 60’s and 70’s and after producing the poster for ‘The Shining’ in 1980, to a large extent, they retired. A beautiful final chapter remained, however. The couple connected with Martin Scorcese in 1990 and produced titles for some of his best films including Goodfellas, Casino, and Cape Fear. The next time you watch the film Casino, as the titles roll to the music of Bach’s St Matthew Passion keep an eye out for the words ‘Title Sequence by Elaine and Saul Bass’.