Play Misty For Me

Fatal Distraction

Play Misty For Me
USA 1971 Directed by Clint Eastwood
Universal Blu Ray Zone B

You know, I hadn’t seen this movie since I watched it on TV in the late 1970s. I don’t know why I never revisited before now because my impressions of it as a 9 or 10 year old were that it was a well made movie, despite my young reservations that it wouldn’t be because it was being directed by the main lead. So I remembered liking this one, even though I find Eastwood a bit hit and miss in terms of movies he appears in and also as a director. So it was a no brainer when I saw the Blu Ray going for £4 a few years back in Fopp records, for me to pick this one up and add it to the ‘to be watched’ pile.

Play Misty For Me was Eastwood’s directorial debut. He’s helmed a fair few movies now as opposed to just starring in them (and staring in them), although obviously not as many as he’s acted in for sure. This one starts off very strongly with an overhead, helicopter tracking shot which was something which became a cliché in 1970s and 80s cinema but this one is a little different because it starts out at the sea and creeps up on some cliffs to set up an establishing shot of Eastwood outside a cliff-side apartment. We join him briefly looking for someone who isn’t around and then he gets into his open top car and shots of him driving are intercut with the return of the overhead helicopter shot tracking his progress into the small town of Carmel-By-The-Sea (where Eastwood, many years later, would become Mayor). The music is jazzy and cool and there’s a wonderful looking font in bright green which really gives the titles a distinctive ‘old Hollywood’ feel... more on that atmosphere later.

He then turns up and takes over from his friend and co-worker as the local radio DJ. It’s established from early on that one of his callers is known for ringing up and asking him to “Play Misty for me”, at which point he obliges by playing Errol Garner’s recording. So the source of all his troubles in the movie is set up quite early on. Very soon after, he goes to his local bar, which features director Don Siegel (who, directed Eastwood in various movies including Dirty Harry and who also helmed the classic, original version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, which I reviewed here) as the bar tender. A girl is waiting at the bar who Dave, that’s Eastwood’s character, is told is impossible to pick up. So Dave and the bartender play this wonderful, completely made up, ridiculous game which is intended to spark interest in those watching. The rules of the game are that when an onlooking girl has joined Dave for a drink, he wins. It’s a fun sequence but the character needn’t have bothered because, as it transpires later, the woman waiting is the ‘Misty’ girl and she was there specifically to meet him and try to win his heart and attention. The overbearing fan is called Evelyn and she’s played here extremely well by Jessica Walter. After Eastwood’s character sleeps with her in a ‘casual’ manner, she suddenly becomes his clutching, stifling, true love... which is awkward for Eastwood, he is trying to reignite the flames with his recent ex-girlfriend Tobie, played here by Donna Mills.

From here on things get dark, as Dave can’t shake Evelyn’s persistent attentions and people get injured or killed, not to mention a scene where Evelyn deliberately slits both her own wrists so Dave won’t send her away and make good on his date with Tobie. If you’re wondering if this feels a little familiar then, yes, I remember going to see a 1980s movie called Fatal Attraction which was, pretty much, the same movie in different clothes. I think a few films have used this as a template now but I think this is probably the strongest version of this kind of tale I’ve seen. At least from the United States.

Eastwood does really well in this, I have to say. Not just as an actor, which you kind of expect by this point and he’s got a large, screen presence... but as a director. This is not in any way a stumbling effort, this is a very strong directorial piece and I can see why he was able to carry on directing stuff. Although there’s no one or two things which are absolutely stand out on this, it isn’t shabbily done and all the compositions are cleanly framed with people meticulously placed within the design. Because of this and combined with the jazzy soundtrack, the film almost feels like a throwback to a more ‘classic Hollywood’ time. I already mentioned the font used on the opening credits and that just provides another layer to the veneer of 1950s style to the proceedings. This one almost feels like what Hitchcock might have done with the same material ten or fifteen years prior to the release of this movie. Also, Eastwood shot the whole thing in a month and considerably under budget, is my understanding.

While Eastwood is pretty good in the role of DJ Dave, Jessica Walter’s performance in this is just amazing. She manages to ‘play crazy’ really well, coming off as normal a lot of the time at first but giving tell tale moments of psychopathic behaviour from very early on which blossom into full scale ‘murder maven’ by about three quarters of the way through. I’d say a lot of the movie is hinging on this performance work and she really is pitch perfect through this. The audience learns to be wary of her a lot quicker than Eastwood’s character does, I would say. She makes a fine nutter (sorry, meant to say she makes a fine sufferer of Borderline Personality Disorder).

If I had one negative thing I could possibly say that there’s a part of the movie, about three quarters of the way through when Evelyn has been arrested and taken into custody for psychiatric treatment, where the movie just kinda stops dead for a while. This involves a long, poetic love scene of Eastwood and Donna Mills making love in the forest (nowadays we’d call it dogging) set to a Roberta Flack recording of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face which, is okay... but then the film goes ito an extended sequence of various bands playing their sets at the Monterey Jazz Festival where Dave and his fellow DJ take their gals, which leaves a little clue as to the twist awaiting Eastwood’s character towards the end of the movie but, it’s mostly just people watching and enjoying the music as the camera explores the crowd.

Now, I was puzzled as to why this extended ‘break’ from the movie was here to be honest and I realise, on reflection, that this scene does serve an important purpose and I also suspect it might have been added at some stage as a ‘rescue’ moment. You see, the scenes after Evelyn has been arrested make up the denouement of the movie and can only take place once Evelyn has been discharged from psychiatric observation. If that had followed in sequence directly after her arrest or even after the love scene, the audience would possibly think the pacing of the movie was a little too fast to get there, is my guess. I think this long pause in the story is a deliberate thing to give the audience a feeling of some considerable time having passed, to make the final set pieces arrive at a more natural point in the narrative. So keeping the right tone almost by stealth, as it were. It might even have been added after a rough cut of the rushes highlighted this problem for all I know. And I don’t know... that’s for sure. But looking back on it, it really works for the film so... yeah, Eastwood really seemed to know what he was doing here.

And that’s my main take away from the movie I think. With Play Misty For Me, Eastwood proved, in no uncertain terms, that he was just as good behind a camera as he is in front of it. It’s a brilliant movie and one I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to anyone into the technical art of film. I possibly prefer his movie The Eiger Sanction to this one but Play Misty For Me is phenomenal and I hope they show this one in film school. It’s a neatly put together movie and I think the various imitations of it over the years, like the aforementioned Fatal Attraction, are a testament to the power of this one. Definitely a highlight of Eastwood’s long career, as far as I’m concerned.

78/52

Shower Power

78/52
2017 USA Directed by Alexandre O. Philippe
UK cinema release print.

78/52 is an unusual documentary in that it spends an hour and a half examining what is, after all, a scene which last less than a minute in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho... the (in)famous shower scene. Of course, the power and initial shock (on first viewing) of this sequence more than justifies the importance and influence it has had on cinema history and modern pop culture but... well, if anything I could have done with a slightly longer movie on the subject (but I’ll come to why I think that in a minute or two).

The film is certainly interesting and the writer/director Alexandre O. Philippe has obviously put in a lot of time and effort piecing together small pieces of footage from a wealth of interesting people from both behind and in front of the camera... giving us a kind of collective ‘expert witness’ of the quality and visceral effectiveness of this effective short sequence. This includes some interesting little moments from Janet Leigh’s body double, who spent a lot of the time filming the scene... her body is in the majority of the short scene, which took seven days to film. Basically, if you see any shots without her face in clear view in the shower scene in Psycho (including the dead body in the clean up following the murder), you’re almost certainly looking at actress/model Marli Renfro, playing the part of the ‘cut down before her time’ character of Marion Crane.

And there are some interesting nuggets to be found during the vivisection of the sequence, some of which I actually didn’t know and some of which are, if you watch the film, self evident. For example, the awkward cut back one last time to the shower head in the pan away from Marion’s body before you get to the money is picked up on by one of the people being interviewed and then explained by another as a mistake in that it was later found that Janet Leigh had taken a visible breath. So that moment had to be eviscerated from the movie as quickly as Norman Bate’s knife made short work of the red herring of a character whose demise is depicted in the scene in question.

There is also a great little moment where the relevance of the painting that Norman Bates (played in Psycho by Anthony Perkins) moves out of the way to reveal the ‘spy hole’ is explained, in terms of both its relevance in the world of art but also its purpose in its placement in the film. I won’t go into it here because... you know... you can watch the film and find out for yourself but, basically, the voyeur is removing a famous interpretaion of a voyeuristic scene to be a participant in the very act that the painting is depicting. And this is all very interesting and revealing, to be fair.

That being said, I did find the documentary to be lacking in many ways, too.

For instance, the long list of people included, most of them extremely briefly, like Mick Garris, Walter Murch, Danny Elfman, Guillermo Del Toro, Neil Marshall and Peter Bogdanovich... are people you would trust to make an observation on this movie but there are others in here who, while very enthusiastic, well... you have to wonder what warranted their inclusion. Presumably, for instance, Elijah Wood is here mostly to comment on the acting in the parlour scene (which is also discussed here) since he’s played a notable psycho or two on screen himself (such as in the recent remake of Maniac or as Kevin in Sin City). Some of the others, however, you have to wonder about.

The biggest problem with the people interviewed, however, is that most of them have such a limited amount of screen time that I would have liked to have seen and heard more from all of them and I reckon the film could have done with being another half an hour longer, in all honesty.

Another fairly large problem with the movie are the re-enactments of certain scenes in Psycho which make you wonder why the director bothered with that when he could have just tracked in scenes from the original. Similarly, the film has a lovely string soundtrack by Jon Hegel (which I really wish was on CD so I could listen to it out of context) and it’s playing over everything, including clips from Psycho and... well you just have to wonder why they chose to go with an original score for this when Bernard Herrmann’s powerful score to Psycho, which the score to 78/52 is obviously trying to invoke in some way, was surely available. I also think that Bernard Herrmann’s astonishing contribution to the film could have been covered a little more in depth, especially since the story of Hitchcock’s insistence that the shower scene needed no music on it until Herrmann proved him wrong is nowhere in evidence in this documentary.

Another thing which is absent here is the very obvious ‘elephant in the room’ of the fact that, as far as I can tell from sorting out various bits of second hand testimony and evidence in books and interviews over the years, Hitchcock didn’t actually direct the shower scene himself but, instead, left it up to the scene’s designer, Saul Bass (one of my hero’s). Now there seems to be a lot of contrary evidence to both support and disregard the claims of both Hitchcock and Bass that they directed the scene and this film doesn’t mention this to weigh in on either version of events. It simply ignores it although, to be fair, it does take a little time to show a few of the many gazillions of story boards that Bass designed for his shoot... I know who I believe but I guess that’s an argument for a different time, especially since, as I said, the auteurial ownership of the scene does not come up in this piece. In fact, it would also have been nice to see the original shower scene actually played out before us in one piece as a reminder of the visceral power of it too, it seems to me. It’s surely been a while since a lot of movie goers watched Psycho.

Another thing which might have been made clearer... and I don’t remember it coming up in the film itself although it might have been so quick that I somehow missed it, is the reason for the title of this film. Apparently, according to the IMDB, it’s because the short scene under scrutiny here, is made up of 78 different camera set ups and 52 edits... which could have done with a little clarification, I think. I suspect some people are going to be walking away from the screenings on this one puzzled about it.

Something else which would have been nice to have been touched upon, since Marli Renfro, the cover girl of the September 1960 Playboy bunny girl, was on hand... was the mysterious and bizarre story of her apparent murder and the confusion of a killer who actually murdered the wrong ‘girl in the shower’ stand in... or some such. I actually don’t know the ins and outs of that story myself (the book on the subject is in one of my many ‘to be read’ piles) but it seems like it might be, at the very least, of passing relevance here. 

All in all, I quite enjoyed certain parts of 78/52, such as the sequence showing the stabbing of different kinds of melons to establish the perfect sound of a knife passing through human flesh and it was nice to hear Jamie Lee Curtis’s own thoughts on her mother’s demise in the scene in question. It’s something which fans of the movie should probably take a look at sometime but I did come out of the cinema feeling fairly unsatisfied with the production. On the other hand, it did provoke some discussion between me and a friend who I saw it with in the pub afterwards... so that was a good thing. This won’t be making any of my top ten lists this year but, as I say, if you are a Hitchcock or Psycho fan, then you might want to give this one a go.

Don't Bother To Knock

Knock Around The Clock

Don’t Bother To Knock
1952 USA
Directed by Roy Ward Baker
20th Century Fox DVD Region 2

Warning: There are a few spoilers here, but I... 
don’t bother to... give away the ending.

Don’t Bother To Knock is a movie I hadn’t seen for a very long time. Not for at least thirty years, in fact, since I was a teen and was obsessed by Marilyn Monroe... not so much for being a great actress (I haven’t seen a great deal of her movies, to be truthful) but as much for the way her imagery was used and exploited as a powerful female icon to many generations (a practice that still remains today). If she’d been allowed to grow old and die a natural death she would, I fear, be nowhere as famous as she is today. Instead, her “brand image” has gone on to inspire and sadden people even now, as much as her acting performances are there to be enjoyed and admired in the modern, home viewing era.

Out of the movies I’ve seen her in, where she’s usually playing flirty, comical roles, this film is among my top three favourite Marilyn performances, along with Niagara and Bus Stop... although don’t ask me where in that top three this one comes because I’ve really not thought about it that much.

This was one of her early films, only five years into her career while she was still finding her feet and the studio really didn’t know what they were doing with her. It’s also, apparently, her first straight dramatic role, I’m informed, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the incredible performance she pulls off in this movie is what directly led to her being cast as the “femme fatale” in Niagara, a year later (and reviewed here).

Shot in black and white, Don’t Bother To Knock is one of those rare films, like High Noon and Before Sunset, which is actually set in real time. That is to say, time passes for the audience at exactly the same rate as the events that take place on the screen and, although the approach to the movie in terms of music and snappy dialogue starts off all bright and breezy with the young Ann Bancroft, making her movie debut as Lyn Lesley, singing old musical numbers in the hotel which provides the setting for the whole story... it’s not long before a decidedly dark tone sets into the piece when we meet our main male protagonist Jed Towers, played by the always reliable Richard Widmark.

Lyn has sent Jed a letter telling him that they are “over”! Naturally, this encourages Jed, an airline pilot, to get a room at the hotel and pester Lyn between songs from her floor show to find out where he went wrong and if there’s any hope of reconciliation. Lyn wants him there but she rejects him again (I’ll never understand the female mind) and he gets naturally frustrated and demonstrative. I don’t blame him when she comes out with confusing statements like... “I’m not angry... I’m just furious.” She said what now?

Even the bar tender, who wants to see Lyn happy, has words of wisdom for Jed when it comes to commitment and caring (which is kinda, I think, where Lyn is going with her psychological shenanigans), and it’s just another example of some great, crisp dialogue moments the movie has. When Jed and he get talking on the subject of “wives” he unleashes this little gem at Jed...

JED: “Get married and you become a statistic.”
BARTENDER: “Stay single and you end up talking to bartenders!”

Meanwhile, the main plot has turned up in the form of Marilyn Monroe playing Nell (originally Munro in the source novel on which the film is based, but apparently changed when the former Miss Norma Jean was cast in the part). Her uncle, who is one of the elevator operators (played absolutely solidly by the great Elisha Cook Jr), has fixed Nell up with the job of babysitting a couple’s 7 or 8 year old girl while they go downstairs to an important party in the ground floor of the building (the father is played by Jim Backus, who many will know as the voice of the short sighted cartoon character Mr. Magoo).

All well and good and all we know about Nell is that she desperately needs a job... but we will slowly begin to piece a lot more of her past together as we go through the movie. Her uncle promises to look in on Nell when he gets off his shift, to see she’s doing okay.

Meanwhile, Jed has given up on Lyn for a while. He goes back to his room, exchanging some more crisp dialogue with Elisha Cook Jr’s elevator operating character, Eddie, on the way up...

JED: “You’re lucky to have such a steady job.”
EDDIE: “Oh, it has its ups and downs sir.”

The film is noirish and Jed’s frustration is palpable as he paces his room, listening to Lyn’s voice on the live floorshow pumped in to the hotel room’s radio set. Then he glances out his window opposite a court in the middle of the hotel and sees Nell in the room across, wearing a sexy dress. He phones her and invites himself over to the room where she’s baby sitting. What he doesn’t know is that the dress and the ear rings and the watch that Nell is wearing belong to the couple who she is baby sitting for. With the kid tucked up in bed (or so she thinks), she starts to try the mother’s perfume and clothes on and eats the candy she so politely refused when offered earlier, in a greedy, gluttonous way which really starts to tell you that... yeah... their might be something a little wrong with our darling Nell.

After Jed has spent ten minutes with her, he begins to get a measure of her too, especially when the little girl comes out and gives the game away that this is not Nell’s apartment. Those tell-tale scars on the underside of Nell’s wrists where she’s tried to kill herself recently are not very reassuring either and, once the child nearly goes out of the window, but for the intervention of Jed... then he really begins to twig. Especially since Nell now mistakes him for her former husband, a pilot who died in an airline crash a few years before. After some shenanigans with busy body neighbours and Uncle Eddie, who Nell knocks cold, leaving him with a big gash in his forehead and... a little later... locked in a closet, Jed slips away to go downstairs and try to patch things up again with Lyn, once he’s made sure the kid is okay. He can see her silhouette sleeping in the dark as he slips out the door so she must be okay, right?

Nope. Another shocking moment in a movie which keeps building the suspense slowly is the revelation that, after all the noise the child has been making, Marilyn has hog-tied her on the bed. When Jed is telling Lyn about his evening and realises what he must have actually seen, in a moment of personal revelation that is similar to those experienced by lead actors in an early Italian giallo in terms of the way the mind plays tricks on one, he rushes up to the floor to find the child’s mother and Nell slugging it out in the girls room and all hell breaks loose.

The house detective arrives to take names and get to the bottom of the story and Nell takes this opportunity to escape, although she’s so out of it by now she doesn’t even realise it’s an opportunity. She grabs a razor blade and “wanders” off without anybody realising and makes her way to the lobby where she threatens to kill herself on account of all the attention she is getting. Then... oh, hang on, I don’t want to spoil everything. Let’s just say that Jed behaves in a manner that Lyn realises Jed has a part of him that he doesn’t show much... a part of him she’s been missing... and through Nell’s tragic tale, the two lovers start their relationship healing process.

This threadbare framework of the movie in no way tells you just how amazing the film is. The direction is quite throwaway in some respects, but the shot design is also be quite clever without making a fuss about it (including a nice conversation moment between Nell and Jed conducted through a shot in a mirror, in one sequence) and long steady shots are the order of the day. The artistry behind the camera is quite evident, even if the delivery is more pedestrian in it’s lack of vertiginous tracking shots and manipulative stylings. It’s a stark noirish milieu with sharp black and white photography and a sense of time ticking by at its own rate. The film is only 76 minutes long but never feels rushed at all or, considering the simplicity of the incidents depicted, in any way padded.

All the acting is top notch and solid, as you would expect from the cast on hand, with even the young Ann Bancroft turning in a fine performance in her first feature. The absolute icing on the cake, though, is Marilyn Monroe’s unbelievably worrying blend of her oft seen child-like naivete coupled with an intense darkness which she is able to let you see play across her features. Seriously, it’s like watching the cogs turning around in her brain, the facial expressions and tone with which she plays the piece is that good. If this was a brand new film this performance would be guaranteed to snag a best actress  oscar away from whoever this year’s hot contenders are. It’s absolutely stunning. The expression on her face when she starts getting her... “dark thoughts”... is absolutely chilling when seen in the context of the rest of her personality. I’m amazed Marilyn wasn’t given a lot more roles like this to do because the way she manages to play the tightrope delicacy of the part is absolutely exquisite. Anyone who thinks Monroe was just a brilliant comic actress or just an icon of female beauty (and she was both of those things too, of course) really needs to sit and watch this film. It won’t take up too much time and the intensity of her performance increasing as the running time wears on is absolutely brilliant.

So anyway, there it is. Don’t Bother To Knock. You can get this movie for a fiver or less at Amazon and if you haven’t seen this one, you really ought to. A classic piece of movie making, the style of which is all but forgotten these days and Hammer Horror enthusiasts might want to look at it to see what the director of such movies as Moon Zero Two (reviewed here), The Vampire Lovers (reviewed here), Quatermass And The Pit (reviewed here) and certain other genre favourites was up to before working on those things.

Saul Bass A Life In Film and Design

Saul In The Mind

Saul Bass A Life In Film and Design

Jennifer Bass & Pat Kirkham

Laurence King Publishing. 

ISBN: 1856697525

Okay... this is another one of those articles which I’ve been putting off for a while because I am just in awe of the subject of the review.

Saul Bass is one of my heroes.

He’s right up there, for me, with Akira Kurosawa, Andrei Tarkovsky, Philip K. Dick, Lester Dent, Kate Bush, Bernard Herrmann and Jerry Goldsmith. 

And once, a long time ago in the troubled decade known mostly as “the 1980s”, I saw him give a two or three hour live show... and it was amazing.

I’d known his work before that of course. Everybody has come into contact, whether they know it or not, with some of his famous graphic design campaigns or logos. I personally knew I loved the title sequences he designed for Hitchcock’s Psycho and North By Northwest... so when I won one of only two free tickets from my College to go to a live lecture at the ICOGRADA (International Council of Graphic Design Associations) show in London one morning, I was really curious as to why it was taking place in the ODEON cinema in Leicester Square and then, when I found out it was Saul Bass talking about his career (along with various breaks for projected footage of his works), I was over the moon.

I’d already seen, at that point, his one commercially released feature film, the sinister and unnerving Phase IV (reviewed here) and so I knew I was going to be in for one of the best experiences of my life. I wasn’t wrong. I discovered then, as the lecture commenced, a whole heap of the logos, symbols and design campaigns that Saul Bass had worked on. 

The famous distillation of the Bell Telephone symbol... a blue bell in a little circle? That was Bass. 

That block colour version of the Quaker Oats guy that tagged their cereals and products for goodness knows how many decades? That was Bass.

That brilliant rendition of the old Warner Brothers logo that stripped the W right back to three, diagonally set curved stripes within a block lozenge shape? You remember that one, right? Pure Bass!

The famous airline liveries, the food lines, the company letterheads and product ranges. He very modestly and hurriedly skipped through it all at a rate of knotts during his lecture and, most endearingly, the guy was funny. He really knew how to entertain an audience. Seriously, he had me and the rest of the packed out cinema (and it was a big cinema back then, before it became a multiplex, I believe) laughing out loud at some of his brilliant stories.

And of course, there were the title sequences he’d designed for movies, some of which he projected for us (I loved his little story about how they couldn’t get the cats to fight over the titles of Walk On The Wild Side and so ended up doing everything through the juxtaposition of the edited shots)and the sequences in movies that he’d directed instead of the actual director, like the shower scene from Psycho and the racing sequences from Grand Prix (another great anecdote he told there about how panicked and unprepared he felt on his first day of shooting and the way he distracted the cast and crew to give him time to prepare was just so great to hear). Plus he showed us some of his much lauded documentary/information films... Why Man Creates. 

It was a truly entertaining session and, as importantly, it was an inspiration to me as a graphic designer to continue to imagine and create and think my way around to solutions in the most appropriate, but not always the most obvious, manner. Of course, all that inspiration was beaten out of me not very long after I started actually working as a graphic designer but, hey, at least I was aspiring to be like my hero, even if my work was destined to be whittled down to nothing by a “design-by-committee” attitude towards the job.

It’s always been a bit hard to come by any books on the work of Saul Bass. When I was in my next College, working on my degree, they had the one book on him that it was possible to get... I think the only book ever published on him which included his flat design work before now. It was a thin, soft back volume with some good samples of his work and it was called Saul Bass And Associates. However, it may have been the only book on him but it was written and printed in Japanese so... apart from the gorgeous samples there wasn’t much help on any biographical information at the time (I’ve never been good at languages).

Then, in 2004 at the Design Museum in London, they had what was supposed to be a major retrospective of Saul Bass’ work. To be honest, it wasn’t all that. I don’t think anyone could call it in any way an extensive collection of his work and I remember feeling a teensy bit disappointed by it.  "Less" definitely wasn’t "more" in this case but, there were some nice pieces on display there, including some rather wonderful film promo letterheads that I’d not seen before. 

An extra kick in the teeth, though, was that there was hardly anything “Bass” in the museum shop at all. Practically nothing in fact (not even a catalogue if I remember correctly). Of course, there were no books available on the designer in the shop (not even the chance to purchase that old Japanese edition to call my own) but there was... a strange thing. A promise of a book. 

There was a flyer promoting a massive book project of Saul’s work which was going to come in at something like a three figured retail price. The object of the flyer was to get people to send off a deposit on the price of the book so the production could be completed more quickly. I didn’t send my money in but I was licking my chops at the prospect of saving my money up for a book on “the master” for the estimated publication date in 2005. 

Needless to say the book never, to my knowledge, materialised.

Now I don’t know if this book, Saul Bass: A Life In Film and Design, started off as that other intended publication, but what I do know is this... it’s the only book to date which covers Bass in any great detail and it’s a labour of love for the writers and designers on the project, one of whom is his daughter Jennifer. 

It’s not just the “only real book” on the market celebrating Bass though... it’s also a great book. 

Really great. 

Absolutely filled to the brim with facts and many, many anecdotes (some of them just as I remember from Saul’s own mouth when I heard him tell them at the ICOGRADA all those decades ago). You get a real sense of the man and his work from those who knew and loved him and also, of course, absolutely gazillions of examples of his beautiful work, attractively reproduced in full colour.

The presented work is really useful too because, although it doesn’t go out of its way to highlight all the instances, you can work out where he re-used bits of old projects and reworked them for other jobs. Probably not consciously, is my guess, since he always approached his work with nothing but dedication and never short changed anyone. However, you can see the influences if you flick forward and back from the vast mountains of his output represented in this book. The way an old logo or letterhead, for example, may turn up as a similar element for his animated titles to It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, or some such, is always interesting to see. Perhaps it’s simply the recognition of a stylistic continuity in his work over the years. Even so, it’s very interesting.

Another great thing about this book is that it doesn’t fail to make known the tremendous importance and design input of his wife, Elaine. Even before they started getting billing as Saul & Elaine Bass, they were a very tight collaborative team and this book makes no bones about the strength of her creative input into Saul’s work. This is something that’s quite important as they were pretty much a team for many decades and it’s another reason why this book is worth its considerable weight in a shiny, metallic substance.

Another thing it brings to light is, un-equivocally the last word about that in/famous shower scene in Psycho. Saul designed and directed it. Sure Hitchcock was on the set but my understanding is that he wasn’t doing too much directing at the time. I was all down to Mr. Bass when it came to it (my understanding is that Hitchcock was generally disappointed in Psycho and was going to cut it down to less than an hour in length for his TV show until he heard Bernard Herrmann’s influential score... suddenly Hitchcock’s publicity brain leapt into action).

Stuff like this definitively revealed is exactly what every fan of this amazing graphic designer’s work want’s to read and there were a few revelations on the directing front which are real jaw droppers. There’s also some very interesting stories about how he dealt with certain clients and dug his heels in on some issues. I wish his techniques would work for me where I do my job.

And there’s probably not too much more I can say about this book, I guess. It’s both a truly excellent read and a beautiful book to own and leave lying around so people can discover this talented designer for themselves. If you’re already a fan of his work, be it his flat art, his title sequences or his direction, you will not want to miss out on reading what is, to date, the most definitive and thorough, if not the only, real book on Bass. A truly epic tome you’ll want to pour through again and again... take a walk on the wild side and give it a go.