More about Saul Bass and Walk On The Wild Side

Partly because of my frustration with being unable to download the title sequence, and partly because today was an especially boring work day, I nosed around for more about the Saul Bass movie credits I posted a few days ago.

Saul Bass was considered one of the best designers of movie title sequences, although he also designed some famous logos and won an Academy Award for the 1968 documentary Why Man Creates.

This is from the oddly-named blog http://potrzebie.blogspot.com/:

What is the best Bass? More than a few feel it is the predatory cat prowling alleyways to the accompaniment of Elmer Bernstein in Walk on the Wild Side (1962).

Bernstein recalled, "Walk on the Wild Side was a second in a series of jazz scores that I wrote in the 1950s and 1960s. The setting for the film was the Southern underworld, which had a particular effect on the kind of music I wrote. Because one thinks of the South as the home of the blues I decided to base the main theme of the score on a kind of rolling blues theme.

Probably the most interesting story about the creation of that theme involves the main title of the film. One day the producer of the film invited the artist Saul Bass and me to come to, what seemed to us, a rather grand home in Beverly Hills. He then started to spin us a story for the images he wanted at the beginning of the film. He started to tell us a story of the good cat and the bad cat and a fight that they get into, and the good cat recovers and walks off. Saul Bass and I looked at each other, rolled our eyes and thought 'a typical silly producer idea.' In any case, Saul went home and started to shoot film with his own cats. He showed it to me, and I then wrote the theme to which the main title was eventually shot."

I also found several online reviews of the movie Walk On The Wild Side, in which it was claimed that fans of Saul Bass would show up for the movie, watch the title sequence, then leave.