The 50 Greatest Opening Title Sequences of All Time

Giving some credit to the finest opening credits ever made.

25. “The Man With the Golden Arm” (1955)
DIrected by Otto Preminger

Given that Saul Bass is widely thought of as the greatest title sequence designer of all time and that dramas about drug use have proliferated significantly since “The Man With the Golden Arm” was produced in 1955, it’s easy to forget the daunting challenge Bass faced with Otto Preminger’s drama about Frank Sinatra as a heroin addict trying to kick his habit. There was no template for what Bass did with just some little white lines and a brassy score from Elmer Bernstein, either in terms of tackling the issue of drug abuse so starkly or of film credits’ design, which up until then had mostly been reduced to lists in cursive fonts. The MPAA never approved the film, but Bass made it so they couldn’t have taken any issue with how it was presented, only implying with the white lines that manifested out of every corner of the frame the sensation of shooting up and the craving for more. When Preminger’s name finally is presented with the craggy arm at the end, the same that was at the center of the film’s entire advertising campaign, it’s the audience that’s hooked. –SS

24. “Bullitt” (1968)
Directed by Peter Yates

I love the way Pablo Ferro’s titles for “Bullitt” use typography to suggest a detective’s work. Credits scroll onto and then off the screen, leaving behind a window of negative space. Rather than cutting between shots, the camera zooms into and through that negative space, giving the audience the sensation of moving deeper and deeper into something, like an investigator working his way through layer after layer of a case in order to uncover the truth. The events we see are ominous but unclear: is it a break-in or a break-out? Who is chasing who and why? Again, it is up to the audience to piece together the clues of what they’re seeing; to infer the scene’s location from the Chicago Daily News billboard, for example (the rest of the film is famously set in San Francisco). I don’t know that we are ever given the full details of that opening scene, like the identtiies of the guys forebodingly leering at us when “BULLITT” flashes on the screen. But that’s fine. Even the best detectives don’t always figure everything out. –MS

23. “Kiss Me Deadly” (1955)
Directed by Robert Aldrich

This nuclear panic film noir freakout establishes its cracked worldview through its unsettling title sequence. The unease starts in the opening shots, with a close-up of Cloris Leachman’s bare feet racing down a pitch black street. Ralph Meeker, starring as Mike Hammer, eases by in his MG coupe, and sarcastically invites her in. Clad in only a trenchcoat, she lets out the sort of moans of pain that could be mistaken for moans of ecstasy, as Nat King Cole’s “Rather Have the Blues” jumps out of the radio. It’s here that the credits start rolling down from the top of the screen, except the text is arranged to read from the bottom up. “Deadly” is stacked above “Kiss Me,” and so on, a disorienting shift that takes some adjustment to parse. It’s an apt introduction to the upside-down America of director Robert Aldrich and writer A.I. Bezzerides. –RES

22. “The Graduate” (1967)
Directed by Mike Nichols

Title sequences don’t get much more simple than the opening of “The Graduate,” nor their impact much more direct. The static shot of Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock taking the airport walkway, set to Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence,” is both timeless and of its era. The scene speaks to a feeling every twentysomething knows, that sense of being thrust forward into adulthood while seemingly going nowhere. As Mike Nichols says in the commentary track for the film, “It was about, I thought, a person who was in danger as he was drowning in objects, in danger of becoming an object…[That’s why] he’s on the same belt as his suitcase.” The sequence has been imitated and plundered numerous times — Quentin Tarantino’s “Jackie Brown” slyly updated it by suggesting Pam Grier was at a similar crossroads later in life to the score of “Across 110th Street” — but its power has yet to be replicated, capturing the fears and ambivalence of that moment when you don’t know where life is going to take you. –SS

21. “Seconds” (1966)
Directed by John Frankenheimer

In “Seconds,” a man trades in his old life for a new one with predictably disastrous results. Saul Bass’ gothic titles for the film, shot through a wildly distorted lens, reflect that story’s themes, namely the loss and impermanence of identity. Black and white images of a human face ripple and mutate, and then divide into mirror images, anticipating the way the protagonist of the film is transformed through plastic surgery, and is ultimately played by two different actors, John Randolph and Rock Hudson. Perhaps most striking of all are the shots that plunge deep into the face’s orifices — mouth, ear, eye and nose — and find only blackness inside. It’s as the camera’s trying to find its subject’s soul, some core of humanity beneath that easily transformed surface, and keeps coming up empty. “Seconds” is something of a referendum on the nature of souls. Bass’ opening looks around and finds its own answer in the blackness. –MS

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