The Man with the Golden Arm
Saul Bass designed emblematic movie posters that transformed the visuals of film advertising. Before Bass's seminal poster for "The Man with the Golden Arm" (1955), movie posters were dominated by depictions of key scenes or characters from the film, often both juxtaposed with each other. Bass's posters, however, typically developed simplified, symbolic designs that visually communicated key essential elements of the film. For example, his poster for "The Man with the Golden Arm", with a jagged arm and off-kilter typography, starkly communicates the protagonist's struggle with heroin addiction. Bass's iconic "Vertigo" (1958) poster, with its stylized figures sucked down into the nucleus of a spiral vortex, captures the anxiety and disorientation central to the film. His poster for "Anatomy of a Murder" (1959), featuring the silhouette of a corpse jarringly dissected into seven pieces, makes both a pun on the film's title and captures the moral ambiguities within which this court room drama is immersed.