Mondays with Saul: Psycho and the Age of Innocence

It's Monday's with Saul Bass.  Saul Bass worked with Hitchcock only once more--Psycho.   This is Bass at moving, break apart text at his finest.  The sequence captures visually the "Psycho" theme of the film, and the straight horizontal lines which grow and shrink and then scurry off the screen in both directions, visually mimic Herrmann's chasing strings and serve as an interesting counterpoint to the chasing diagonal lines from the previous Hitchcock film, North by Northwest.


Contrast this title sequence with his work on Scorsese's The Age of Innocence. The opening and closing flowers evoke his work for Vertigo--and, indeed, there are some thematic connections shared by both films. The titles are beautifully evocative of a time that can really exist only in our minds, that of the age of innocence.


The last theater is screening some brief, admonishing words from the master himself.