Man with a Golden Arm

Eyes stare out of the darkness, so green and narrow they could have been admired by a lecherous khan. They move closer. A young black cat, just full grown, steps out of a bit of sewer pipe and starts to move through the city. Its gait is all leg and female, stealthy, preying. It walks across curbs and over the cracks in sidewalks. It hunts and bristles and pads along, looking. The eyes again. Another cat. Snarl. Fangs. Battle. A fierce toss of bodies, fearsome screeches, victory. The black cat moves on. All the while, words are appearing above, below, beside the animal. And people's names. Directed by Edward Dmytryk. Titles designed by Saul Bass. Charles K. Feldman presents Walk on the Wild Side.

"Titles by Saul Bass" is the arresting line. Movie audiences used to resent, with the same resentment that is provoked by a TV commercial, the long parade of credits at the beginning of a film. Saul Bass has singlehandedly changed that. More than half of New York's film critics actually cited Bass's black stalking malkin as far and away the best thing in Walk on the Wild Side. It was. Suggesting the story's themes of harlotry, perversion and vengeance, it set a mood that the ensuing picture tried but failed to match.

Designer Bass is imitated by just about everybody now, but no one has come near him. Sometimes his effects are relatively simple. Looking up from the hub of a wagon wheel, he stared out across a tan Pacific of endless real estate and then placed three small words on the threshold of infinity: The Big Country. To credit the cast and crew of The Seven Year Itch, he used a set of pastel panels opening like tessellated greeting cards. That was all. But the colors and layout were as visually delightful as a Mondrian in motion. And the t in Itch scratched itself.

Using animation for his longest titlepiece, he set up a facsimile ---- of Cantinflas' antique bicycle and pedaled it Around the World in 80 Days past Egypt's Sphinx adorned with the thick mustache and rolling eyes of Robert Newton. Bass did the credits of West Side Story, scrawled on grimy walls like four-letter words. He drew the fixed and crippled hand of The Man with the Golden Arm and the jig-sawed corpse of Anatomy of a Murder. For Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, he let his spook imagination run on even further. He began with a vulture-close view of a human eye, then moved in side the eye. where spinning, vertiginously kaleidoscopic patterns appeared and changed form, starting Hitchcock's shocker with a Rorschacher. The names went by -- James Stewart, Kim Novak -- under abstract suggestions of nuzzling dolphins, pregnant terns and wooing rattlesnakes.

Saul Bass works in an old stucco house on Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard. He quit his job at an ad agency to set up his own shop there in 1955. Madison Avenue advertising agencies now study Saul Bass film credits in search of new techniques for TV commercials. At 41, Bass is easily the highest-priced man in his field. He is also the creator of the new color-drop Kleenex box and the new, wasp-waisted Wesson Oil bottle. He never repeats him self. "If you don't risk everything every time out." he says, "your creative reservoir goes dry, and ultimately you fail."

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