Walk on the wild side (1962) title sequence

“The titles for the 1962 production of Walk on the wild side were so arresting and so widely acclaimed that the film is remembered for little else.”— David Zeitlin, LIFE Magazine, february 1964

“In these titles I came to grips with what I think is the most challenging aspect of any creative endeavor and that is to deal with ordinary things. Things that we know so well that we ceased to see them. Deal with them in a way that allows us to understand them again. In a sense it’s making the ordinary extraordinary. For instance: Nine hours to Rama is about the nine hours which preceded the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. By taking a clock – an ordinary object – an subjecting it to an unrelenting examination I hoped to create an intensification of one’s awareness of each moment.

In Walk on the wild side I used a cat, a creature we’ve probably stopped really seeing a long time ago. Now the challenge was: how to restore our original view of the cat, when it was new and strange, and to transform it into a pervasive presence which was at the same time fateful to Nelson Algren’s story of New Orleans’ street life. — Saul Bass, “Bass on titles”