which were decidedly unique compared to the mundane lettering
superimposed over backgrounds common in Hollywood movies at that
time. In 1955 he made a bolder leap with the print advertising for The Man
with the Golden Arm,which eschewed a picture of its star, Frank Sinatra, in
favor of a pattern of black bars that framed a primitive woodcut-like
rendering of a crooked arm. Theater owners were not pleased with the
absence of the one-two punch of star portrait and heroic vignette. But one
incident tells the story of Bass’s subsequent success: “[Preminger] was
sitting with his back to me—he didn’t know I was there—talking on the
phone, obviously to an exhibitor somewhere in Texas,” Bass recalled in
Graphic Design America. “The exhibitor was complaining about the ads and
saying that he wanted to have a picture of Sinatra....And I heard Otto
say to him, ‘Those ads are to be used precisely as they are. If you change
them one iota, I will pull the picture from your theater.’ And hung up on
him.” Rather than hype the film, the graphic reduced the plot, the story of
a tormented drug addict, to an essence—a logo really—that evoked the
film’s tension.
Jumping at the opportunity to animate this simple graphic form as
the title sequence for the film, Bass created a series of moving white bars on
a black screen, which was transformed into an abstract ballet of erratic
shapes. After a few moments the bars metamorphosed into the arm. “There
was a tendency, when I did the title for The Man with the Golden Armto
think it worked because it was ‘graphic,’” Bass explained in Print( 1960 )
“but that was incidental. If it worked, it was because the mood and feeling
it conveyed made it work, not because it was a graphic device.”
Nevertheless, by creating a graphic symbol that was effective for use in both
the print campaign and the opening title sequence, Bass had introduced a
new design form.
Actually, he returned to the essence of motion pictures before
sound, Technicolor, Cinemascope, and other pyrotechnic advances upped
the ante of filmmaking. Movies began as a purely visual medium. “We’ve
come full circle,” Bass once explained, “[we] went to a theatrical stage
approach with inordinate reliance on dialogue, and now we’re back again
to a greater reliance on the visual, but in a way that is more real and more
current with our lives today.” Not surprisingly, Bass was often called upon
to direct certain sequences within films where the visual scheme was more
important to moving the story along than the dialog.
The Man with the Golden Armwas more than a fine piece of
abstract animation. It was Bass’s first movie within a movie, and it had less
to do with specific aesthetics of design than a sense of the story (a key trait
in Bass’s later work). Yet it was not an independent effort; he believed that
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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