November 7th & November 14th | 15 Movies
A dark, deserted highway. A pair of running bare feet slap the pavement as a desperate woman (Cloris Leachman) clad only in a trench coat frantically tries to flag down passing cars. She causes one to nearly run off the road. “You almost wrecked my car,” growls the driver, private eye Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker). “Well? Get in!"
Oh, do I have your attention now?
This is the pulse-pounding opening to Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), included in TCM’s two-part, 15-film celebration of some of cinema’s most memorable opening title sequences.
Kiss Me Deadly’s opening is a real grabber. As the woman hyperventilates, a romantic Nat King Cole song is heard on the radio. The car’s passengers are filmed from behind as the film’s credits run backwards, top of the screen to the bottom.
Writing for rogerebert.com, Kim Morgan nails what makes this “totally perverse and subversive” opening something much more than mere shock value: “Aldrich and cinematographer Ernest Laszlo instantly address the expressionistic, off kilter and monstrous universe we’re about to enter.”
That’s what the best opening title sequences do. They are the tantalizing place settings that whet your appetite for the cinematic meal to come. Frank Tashlin’s Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), which kicks off TCM’s titles tribute, is especially delicious, a fourth-wall breaking blast of meta mayhem. Wrote Richard Brody in The New Yorker, “Few credit sequences launch a movie with as inventive a comic high.”
The film’s star, Tony Randall, kicks things off acting as a one-man orchestra playing 20th Century Fox’s iconic fanfare. “Oh, the fine print they put in an actor’s contract these days,” he explains. Producing notes from his jacket, he fumbles on the title of the film he’s introducing. “The Girl Can’t Help It,” he announces triumphantly before instantly correcting himself. “No, we made that.”
The credits unfold through a series of commercial parodies and sight gags that anticipate the film’s satirical worldview of advertising. It’s all quite animated, which is to be expected when one considers that Tashlin got his start at Warner Bros.’ legendary Termite Terrace in the 1930s directing some of the studio’s funniest cartoons, primarily featuring Porky Pig.
One of the masters of opening title sequences is graphic designer Maurice Binder, who is perhaps best known for the opening sequences he designed for the James Bond franchise. He is represented in TCM’s tribute to opening title sequences with Stanley Donen’s Charade (1963).
Set to Henry Mancini’s propulsive waltz-time theme, Binder stylishly and hypnotically sets the stage for Donen’s suspenseful romantic thriller with a fantasia of swirling, swooping and spinning animated lines and gears that reflect the machinations of the labyrinthian plot.
Oscar-winner Saul Bass, another pioneer of the art form, likewise used titles “to create a climate for the story that was about to unfold,” he said in an interview. One of his most effective sequences was for Otto Preminger’s Production Code-defying adaptation of Nelson Algren’s novel about drug addiction, The Man with the Golden Arm (1956).
White bars against a black background form abstract patterns until they coalesce into Bass’ defining and viscerally gripping image of a grasping, crooked arm. In an interview, Bass noted, “The intent of this opening was to create a mood spare, gaunt, with a driving intensity… [that conveyed] the disconnectedness and disjointedness of the addict’s life the subject of the film.”
One of the most memorable opening title sequences is for Gordon Parks’ Shaft (1971), one of those instantly iconic “something new has been added” moments in film history. Shaft followed Ossie Davis’ Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970) and Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, but its phenomenal box office success took the fledgling blaxploitation genre mainstream.
Shaft’s opening sequence has lost none of its middle-finger-to-the-Man swagger as Richard Roundtree’s private investigator John Shaft walks New York’s streets to the tune of Isaac Hayes’ Oscar-winning theme song. Clearly, this is “the cat that won’t cop out when there’s danger all about,” and the sequence bespoke a message of black empowerment.
A tribute to classic opening title sequences would not be complete without the tour-de-force just over three-minute tracking shot that sets Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) in motion.
This bravura overture is a reaffirmation of Alfred Hitchcock’s theory about suspense vs. shock. The clock is ticking as the camera tracks the car and its unwitting passengers as it wends its way through the teeming streets of a Mexican border town. We, the viewers, know there is a bomb in the trunk and are on the edge of our seats, especially when the car pulls up alongside the film’s stars, Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh.
How much more effective is this than a sudden unexplained bomb explosion that would indeed be shocking for that second?
This brings us to Robert Altman’s The Player (1992), which follows Touch of Evil (kudos to the TCM programmers on this pairing!). Altman’s acerbic Hollywood tale opens with a bravura eight-minute tracking shot that offers a meta commentary on, well, bravura tracking shots. “The pictures they make these days
are all MTV,” says the studio’s chief of security (Fred Ward). “Cut, cut, cut. The opening shot of Touch of Evil was six and a half minutes long…three or four, anyway. He set up the whole picture with that one tracking shot.”
As does Altman, who over the course of the opening deftly establishes studio hierarchy and introduces the key—wait for it—player, compromised studio exec Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) as he takes script pitches from writers (The Graduate, Part II, anyone?)
TCM saves one of the screen’s greatest opening title sequences for last. One of the final films in the tribute, Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night (1964), recalls a story Groucho Marx told chronicler Charlotte Chandler. “We were playing a small town in Ohio,” he said, “and a man came to the box office and said, ‘Before I buy the ticket, I want to know one thing: is it sad or high kickin’?”
This, in essence, is the question that the best opening title sequences answer, and it doesn’t get more high-kickin’ than A Hard Day’s Night, which plays out with the exuberance of a Marx Brothers comedy classic. Kicked off by George Harrison’s iconic opening chord of the title song, the opening sequence establishes the film’s docu-like day-in-the-life sensibility as John, George and Ringo run from a horde of relentless screaming fans.
From the balletic opening of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) to the Cinemascope triptych that begins Michael Gordon’s Pillow Talk (1959), these opening title sequences are compelling mini-movies in their own right.
But do stick around to watch the rest of the films. They’re pretty good, too.
