Even if Saul Bass’ name isn’t familar, his work certainly is. Over the course of his 40-year career, Bass worked for some of Hollywood’s most prominent filmmakers and produced some of the medium’s most iconic posters. Contributing to legendary directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese, Bass also produced title sequences for some of the most popular films of all time as well as some of the most enduring company logos as well (AT&T? That was him).
Unfortunately, Bass passed away due to non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in 1996, at the premature age of 75. However, Bass’ legacy has been timeless, with many contemporary posters paying homage to his iconic pieces. Google even produced a ‘Doodle’ in 2013, in celebration of his 93rd birthday.
Nevertheless, for those uninitiated, the extent of Bass’ work may be surprising – he’s responsible for so many celebrated posters, it’s really quite exciting. So here is a selection of the best Saul Bass movie posters.
The poster that launched Bass’ career and made him a rising star of the poster-design world. Directed by Otto Preminger, The Man with the Golden Arm follows a jazz musician’s struggle to overcome a heroin addiction. Very much a taboo choice of subject matter for the 1950s, Bass reflected the film’s controversial topic by creating an equally innovative poster.
The paper image of the cut-out arm of a heroin addict was unlike anything the industry has seen before, and Bass became a popular choice for poster designs.
A prolific partner of Alfred Hitchcock, Bass produced many posters for the celebrated director and even designed the title sequences for films like North by Northwest (1959). However, the most iconic poster he designed for Hitchcock has to be 1958’s Vertigo.
How do you design a poster that accurately reflects the feeling of vertigo (the false sense of rotational movement)? Well, like this. In one masterfully designed image, Bass manages to convey not only sense of vertigo, but also the idea of being stuck in a confusing and overwhelming mystery, reflecting the plot of the film as well. Two birds, one excellent poster.
How can a poster so simple prove to be so effective? Once called the “finest pure trail film ever made”, Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder sees a former district attorney being roped into the most forensic and confusing case of his career. As the lawyer breaks down the investigation, he finds himself having to question every detail placed before him… and Bass’ poster quite effortlessly conveys all of this.
The black outline of the murder victim roots the film as an investigation, but the disassembled appendages gives the impression that everything needs to be broken down and studied. This is a case (and a film) that requires a systematic attention to detail.
Writer and directed by John Sturges, The Magnificent Seven was an ‘Old West’ reimagining of Akira Kurosawa’s iconic 1954 film, Seven Samurai. Featuring seven gunfighters hired to protect a small village in Mexico from a group of marauding bandits, the film became emblematic of the genre and firm favorite of many.
As a film with a surprisingly gory subject matter (the titular seven end up having to defend the town by killing all the bandits), Bass designed an understated poster that reflects this bloody focus – it’s almost as if one of the seven are tallying up how many they’ve killed in blood. It’s not fully known why this poster wasn’t chosen, but it’s pretty apparent how cool it is nonetheless.
Famously, Stanley Kubrick is as much of a perfectionist as an auteur can get, demanding every detail of a film fits his particular vision. Unfortunately for Saul Bass, this perfectionism extended to movie posters as well. Indeed, Bass had to produce over 300 versions of The Shining’s poster before Kubrick was satisfied; luckily, the end result is one of the greatest posters of all time.
Serving as a loose homage to the film’s most memorable sequence (“Here’s Johnny!!”), The Shining’s poster design is minimal yet haunting, with the overt yellow reinforcing the film’s unsettling nature.
Reportedly, one of the last posters Bass produced in his lifetime, his design for Steven Spielberg’s epic historical drama, Schindler’s List, never saw wider use. Once again, it is unknown why this poster design wasn’t used, but many have speculated that the poster was perhaps too pessimistic, even for a film with such a depressing subject matter as Schindler’s List.
Nevertheless, the imagery employed by Bass is striking and is held up as some of his finest work by fans. The heavily connoted imagery of the barbed wire paired with what the punctured list represent offers a thematic juxtaposition very few can achieve – truly, Saul Bass was one of the greats.
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