Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Opening Credits: North by Northwest

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6 comments:

David Cranmer said...

I've seen this movie so many times. More so than any other Hitch film.

7:42 PM
pattinase (abbott) said...

Me, too. I think they run it more than any other one on TCM.

7:47 PM
le0pard13 said...

One of the all-time movie title sequences by the great Saul Bass. I like what the Art of the Title site had to say about it in their recent spotlight post:

"Bass had experimented with graphic animation techniques as far back as The Seven Year Itch in 1955, but the title cards themselves had always remained static. North by Northwest is often credited as being the first sequence to use kinetic type — or simply, type in motion. It is also one of the first examples of situational type in film, where the text is integrated into the environment by matching its perspective, a technique famously revisited by Picture Mill for David Fincher’s Panic Room in 2002.

Although Bass was already an established designer by 1959, North by Northwest is likely his first truly modernist title sequence, adopting a clean, minimal style and a veneer of graphic sophistication previously unseen in his title work or elsewhere in mainstream film. It’s a style that he carried into his next two projects, Psycho and Ocean’s Eleven, and would revisit almost 30 years later for Goodfellas in 1990.

9:10 PM
pattinase (abbott) said...

Thanks for the added info. It is truly a thrilling beginning.

7:13 AM
Anonymous said...

Patti - What a terrific Hitchcock film!! I always liked this one very much. But then, I'm a Hitchcock fan...

7:45 AM
Prashant C. Trikannad said...

Patti, this film has maximum reruns on TCM India too. My memorable scene in the movie is where Grant's character goes on a bidding binge to get himself arrested by the cops.

8:16 AM

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