Credit where credit is due

A friend forwarded me this post on The Screengrab — The Twelve Greatest Opening Credits in Movie History. Not a bad selection, with some highly appropriate honorees:

• The great Saul Bass. Hard to choose between Vertigo, Psycho, and North by Northwest, but if pressed I think I'd favor the latter.


• Robert Brownjohn and Maurice Binder, for their immortal work on the Bond series. Goldfinger, From Russia With Love, Thunderball, The Spy Who Loved Me — all excellent. I have to also throw in GoldenEye and Casino Royale as two of the best Bonds for opening credits.


• Denis Rich (designer) and John Williams (music), for the main titles of Superman: The Movie. No kidding.

Conspicuously missing from the list, possibly because there aren't any opening credits per se, is the greatest opening title of all time: the Star Wars crawl. (Fun: Star Wars titles as done by Saul Bass, courtesy Popwatch.)

Setting aside Hitchcock, Bond, and Star Wars, I have to add my own Top 10, all missing from the Screengrab list:

1. Once Upon a Time in the West — Now this is an opening credits sequence. Best performance of Jack Elam's career, and he barely lives past the director's title. Nothing else in the movie lives up to the promise of its first 10 minutes. A masterpiece unto itself.
   
   
2. The Shining — Scariest credits ever. The steadicam skims that placid alpine lake, rises and descends menacingly upon a tiny car winding its way higher and higher into the mountains and towards the evil destiny that awaits its driver. And that music. And those crazy moaning/wailing voices, or whatever they're supposed to be. Freaks me out to this day.
   


3. Alien — Never was an orchestra put to such great and subtle effect as the windlike moaning punctuated by light, haunting chords in the opening to Alien. The camera pans very slowly across a grim starfield and eclipsed planet, and one by one those five hashmarks (representing victims?) appear along the top of the screen, and then turn into the letters A L I E N. What follows is equally effective: the camera wanders through the cold, still corridors of the hibernating ship, which suddenly yawns to life with some of the strangest, most unnatural-sounding computer sound effects ever devised. The ventilation comes on , then the lights, then the doors whoosh open. Never has an inanimate object come to life so eerily.
   


4. McCabe & Mrs. Miller — The wind. The movie opens with the whistle of a cold, merciless wind as the camera pans across a soggy, uninviting landscape. Then the quiet strums of Leonard Cohen's woeful The Stranger Song come up as we see a lone rider — McCabe — slogging his way toward one very bleak town. He crosses a rather unpleasant rope bridge over an icy river, muttering to himself. He finally finds and enters the town's only hotel-restaurant-saloon, a dark, crowded, dank, close structure. He shakes the water from his hat, checks the back door, then clears off a table and starts up a poker game with the locals. The beautifully filmed sequence is chilling, claustrophobic, oppressive, and gorgeously bleak.
   


5. Blood Simple — Probably the most clever opening credits I've seen. We see two occupants of a vehicle, driving at night and shot from behind, illuminated only as silhouettes by the light refracted on the wet windshield. The only punctuation is the swipe of the car's wipers, and the flashes of the headlights of passing cars. Each bright flash leaves behind a new title, which hangs on their windshield until the next pass of the wipers clears it away. Brilliant.
   


6. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly — Rough, grainy, weathered, and explosive, and most importantly, backed by Ennio Morricone's greatest score.
   


7. Contact — We zoom away from the Earth, deeper and deeper into space (and back through time as the radio signals on the soundtrack weaken and fade away). Finally, there's nothing but a heavy, desolate silence as we retreat even from our own galaxy and into the big black empty. And then, suddenly, we're pulling away from Jena Malone's iris — all the universe in the eye of a child.
   


8. The Usual Supects — These credits aren't really anything special, they're just good. A slow pan across lights reflected as wavy lines in the dark waters of the harbor, backed by John Ottman's beautiful, dreamlike score. Very sleepy, very haunting, and classically noir.
   


9. Memento — A closeup of a hand holding a Polaroid photo of a dead body. Every few seconds, the hand waves the photo back and forth, they way you do when “developing” a fresh Polaroid. Only, after few moments, you realize that you're seeing the photo develop in reverse — the image slowly fades away, just like the memories of the man who snapped the photo. Sets the tone of the movie perfectly. Also cool because due to the film's time structure, this is actually the final shot of the story.
   


10. Jaws — One chord. Just one chord, played over the Universal Studios logo. You know immediately what movie this is going to be. Sure, John Williams's rapid two-chord refrain and the swimming shark's-view footage of the ocean floor are all classic. But really, it's that one low, murky, simple chord at the very beginning that does it.