3 posts tagged “henry mancini”

The trailer to one of my favourite films—but it’s very 1960s. A modern audience won’t exactly get excited over this. That’s ironic though: if you see the film, there are plenty of scenes which could be edited in a modern fashion to create a very impactful trailer. But since it was the 1960s, this was perfectly acceptable and there’s just enough of Sophia Loren in a state of undress to get her fans along. And plenty of Christian Dior dresses and shoes (oh, the shoes—they were in Loren’s contract and written in to the script as a fetish of Alan Badel’s character). Gregory Peck, meanwhile, is still one of the top stars of the time—doing a role originally written for Archie Leach (Cary Grant to the rest of us). Note the prominence of Henry Mancini’s name, too. 
   As a movie it holds up remarkably well, far better than the trailer.

Un pub pour le film Arabesque, de Stanley Donen, avec Gregory Peck et Sophia Loren.

The titles to Blake Edwards’ The Tamarind Seed are a great example of the late Maurice Binder’s 1970s’ work. This spy film, with music by John Barry and starring Julie Andrews (the real-life Mrs Blake Edwards) and Omar Sharif, is little known and one of the very few times Edwards did not collaborate with composer Henry Mancini. The visuals and the theme work beautifully and Binder shows his preference by this time for Swiss typography (the use of Helvetica for one). In the past I had shown some 1960s’ Binder work, but I think there’s still a lot of modernist beauty to this 1974 film’s opening.

A YouTube member has been posting some beautiful Maurice Binder title sequences, including those from my favourite movies, Arabesque (mysteriously not released on DVD) and Charade. I love the modernist nature of Binder’s work, and while he is best known for the James Bond gun-barrel sequence, there was a lot more to the man’s designs.
   The following two are mated to Henry Mancini scores for Stanley Donen films.

   Another favourite (again with Mancini, and Donen producing and directing) is this opening from the Audrey Hepburn–Albert Finney film Two for the Road:    A few more to round off this post. We have The Grass Is Greener, which shows that Binder could do a very cute sequence with babies. The second is Raquel Welch packing a parachute in Fathom. Ken Hughes’ Billion Dollar Brain is unusual and less pleasant, but it fits with the tone of the last Harry Palmer film. But even here, Binder’s sense of modernist typography continues.    His style continued into the 1970s and remained, in my view, current for that decade. The last for this post is from the James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me, and is closer to what some associate with Binder (girls and Helvetica). The Marvin Hamlisch song, performed by Carly Simon, is particularly fitting. The titles to Moonraker, which I find to be very 1970s and with a John Barry-composed song, are not yet on YouTube.
   In all cases, there is a sense of timelessness, which shows just how suited the principles of modernism were to title design. These ideas are still often observed by some of the most famous designers out there, such as Wayne Fitzgerald.