Edge of the City (1957)

“You go with the men and you’re 10 feet tall. You go with the lower forms and you are down in the slime.” — Tommy Tyler

The late 1950s were an important time for Saul Bass. The graphic designer, previously known mostly for his eye-catching poster designs and innovative trade ads, was changing the way Hollywood thought about opening credits with his stunning main title sequences for films such as Carmen Jones, The Seven Year Itch, and most significantly The Man with the Golden Arm, his third and most well-known collaboration with director Otto Preminger.

“A movie's title and its list of credits is usually a monotonous interlude when moviegoers go to the popcorn machine or the rest room or simply explore their seats for long-range comfort and chatter with their companions about where they'll eat after the show,” Bass told Newsweek in a 1958 interview for Bonjour Tristesse. “They consider the whole title thing a great bore.”

Aware that his work was changing the paradigm for opening credits at the time, Bass summed up his approach to film title design thusly: “I've forced the audience to sit down and watch. I do, visually, a one-sentence reduction of the story, a real tight condensation of a big, fluffy, wonderful thing. I sort of compress it into a little white tablet."

That beautifully simple approach applied so…

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