Promising Starts: Great Film and TV Openings

Our favorite opening titles and sequences, in commentary and video

The opening to a film is like finally getting to meet someone you’ve only heard about, someone you know only through hearsay or reputation. You get the suspense of your own first impression and a hint of something to follow, even if you’re not sure what that something means or what it will become. If you’re seeing a film for the first time, one you’ve waited with anticipation – or dread – there’s also sometimes a sense of getting to the top of a roller coaster, the adrenaline rush of getting close to the exhilaration of what’s about to happen.

The best films recognize that their openings, like the openings to great novels, set the tone and lay the groundwork for the stories that follow. Some seek to dazzle us with style and attitude; others beat down our expectations or resistance, compelling us into their worlds. The following films represent some of our favorite movie and television openings, both title sequences and otherwise. Each one achieves something different, but each one puts forward a central idea of its film.

1. Seven Days In May (1964) – John Frankenheimer’s Cold War thriller centered around a rogue Joint Chief of Staff (Burt Lancaster) attempting a military coup of the federal government and the pacifist U.S. President (Fredric March) and breakaway Pentagon official (Kirk Douglas) attempting to stop him. Legendary title sequence designer Saul Bass puts the very U.S. Constitution under siege by the interconnected days, the hands of a clock becoming lightning bolts on the nation’s seal, and the White House shut off by nuclear missiles. It’s the film’s core struggle encased in a symbolic smart bomb, made more effective by Jerry Goldsmith’s martial score:

2. Crime Story (1986) – Michael Mann executive produced this NBC series starring Denis Farina (Law & Order) and Stephen Lang (Avatar) as 1960′s lawmen in perpetual struggle against a rising crimelord (Anthony Denison.) Halfway through the first season the show shifted locales from Chicago to Las Vegas, and the second season opening credits celebrated both the show’s edgy violence and Vegas’ neon-noir allure, all set to a souped-up version of Del Shannon’s classic “Runaway.” The rooftop fistfight image always bowls us over.

3. Taxi Driver (1976) – The beginning to Martin Scorcese’s dissection of mid-1970s alienation and violence drops the audience straight down into anti-protagonist Travis Bickle’s (Robert DeNiro) lonely world, a world of rainy gutters, dirty smoke, and fleeting images of humanity. The city around him shifts to streaking, muddled primary colors and back as the soulful interlude in Bernard Hermann’s otherwise menacing score almost mocks Bickle’s loneliness. Even the credits themselves are fleeting, with the cast’s names rising and falling into the steam clouds swallowing the cab.

4. Bullitt (1968) – the legendary, game-rewriting car chase sequence has overshadowed much of the rest of this sleek thriller by director Peter Yates. Yet the enthralling opening heist, highlighted by Pablo Ferro’s title design, seems to move in a half-dozen directions at once, thanks in part to Lalo Schifrin’s swinging score. For a film about shifting morality and individual sel-reliance, the sequence both cements the viewer’s own perspective while at the same time preparing them for the swirl of events and motivations to come. And – and! – it just looks so damn cool, besides.

5. Repo Man (1984) – Alex Cox’s snarly saga about a Los Angeles teen (Emilio Estevez) who falls into possession of a 1964 Chevy Malibu with extraterrestrial corpses in its trunk is quintessential punk rock cinema from a time before “punk” was merely a marketing brand. The opening credits, with typically belligerent music from Iggy Pop, lights up a series of road maps in radioactive greens, taking the viewer on the road to nuclear Hell.

The credits use (for their time) state of the art wipe edits and pixellated effects to show movement across the Southwestern United States, giving the largely L.A.-centered film a road movie sense of urgency. Still, they seem proudly low-budget and deliberately cool, which is exactly the mood the film wants to strike.

6. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) – An affectionate but undaunted homage and satire of film noir tropes (the script wears its Raymond Chandler influences on its sleeve), Shane Black’s dark comedy thriller was adored mostly by critics who got the knowing references but yet failed to draw much attention or box office among the public. Still, it was the start of Robert Downey, Jr.’s comeback, while also featuring an unfairly overlooked turn by Val Kilmer as a gay private investigator and a winning performance by Michelle Monaghan as an actress shifting between femme fatale and girl next door at whim.

Title designer Danny Yount based the breezy, colorful opening sequence on Saul Bass’ 1960′s work, matching the images to the music and keeping the tone playful and smart. In some ways it’s much lighter in tone than the film that follows, but it’s nevertheless perfectly fun to watch for pure enjoyment all on its own.

7. Trainspotting (1996) – A film that captured counter-cultural disgust with the mainstream in the 1990s much like Repo Man did for the 80s, Danny Boyle’s ensemble story of working class Edinburgh heroin addicts and assorted desperate souls (based on Irvine Welsh’s novel) briefly made the mantra “Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career.” a sardonic catchphrase for anti-commercialism. The film also launched the careers of several of its stars, including Ewan McGregor, Kelly MacDonald, Kevin McKidd, Johnny Lee Miller, and Robert Carlyle.

The short, breathless opening sequence explains the characters’ whole lives, guided by McGregor’s flawless narration (which, by the way, is NSFW for several reasons.)

Some films that would surely have made this list, had their credits been available for embedding, include: We Own The Night, Fight Club, Fahrenheit 451, Where the Sidewalk Ends, and Sherlock Holmes. If this list were longer, it would also include  Spartacus, The Conversation, Cutter’s Way, To Live and Die In L.A., and The Man With The Golden Arm.

- Michael Kabel

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Preview: The Men Who Stare At Goats

George Clooney and Ewan McGregor star in a story too strange to be anything but true.

Maybe we’re getting jaded in our old age, but the idea that the U.S. Army might try and utilize psychic powers, including telepathy and clairvoyance, makes a certain shabby kind of sense. Compared to the crazy-ass science fiction weapons already in use or development – robot planes, guns in space, smart missiles – the idea that government money gets spent researching psychic weapons doesn’t seem that far-fetched, especially in the anything-goes years of the Cold War but also in its sequel, the War on Terror. Why shouldn’t the military extend its reach into the unnatural, and what would happen if it did?

November’s The Men Who Stare At Goats deals with just those true-life subjects, adapting British journalist Jon Ronson’s 2005 book of the same name. Directed by Grant Heslov (Good Night and Good Luck), the film brings to the screen the three-decade history of the First Earth Battalion, the group of New Age mystics, adepts, and eccentrics charged with using their ostensible extraordinary gifts to help the Army in a variety of intelligence gathering and offensive goals. The title refers to a project based in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in which Battalion recruits attempted to kill goats through mind control, simply by staring at them. Other objectives included walking through walls, reading minds, and telepathic communication.

The film centers on story-starved Iraq War correspondent Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), who accidentally makes contact with Battalion veteran Lyn Cassady (George Clooney). Cassady claims to be a master mentalist – a “Jedi warrior” – and ex-battalion operative. He’s been reactivated in the aftermath of 9/11, he says, and his current mission is to find missing unit founder and leader Bill Django (Jeff Bridges). Wilton accompanies his new contact through Iraq in exchange for the lowdown on the government’s extra-normal agenda; along the way they run into Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey), a former unit member now running a prison camp, who may himself be involved in Django’s disappearance.

Also apprearing are Stephen Root, Stephen Lang, J.K. Simmons, Robert Patrick, and Terry Serpico in various roles. We’ll use our psychic powers of second-guessing to propose that Root and Lang play Battalion members while Simmons, Patrick, and Serpico appear as the straightforward military types. The trailer below shows the actors, especially Bridges, comfortably brandishing familiar personas for which audiences have loved them before.

It’s tempting to think of the film, as other sites have suggested, as a Coen Brothers project minus the brothers themselves: the weird subject matter, the cast full of ringers, the bleak humor. Yet as the Coens’ cinematic vision grows ever darker and nastier, a void opens for others to attempt the kinds of comedic free-for-alls they used to make (Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski), and using the Iraq War as the setting for such a black comedy feels right and appropriate. The creative team is relatively untested, but ambitious: Peter Straughan (How To Lose Friends & Alienate People) wrote the adapted screenplay, while Heslov has previously directed only one feature-length project, 2002′s indie dramatic comedy Par 6.  Finally, the film represents the second major release from Smoke House Pictures, the production company Heslov and Clooney founded in 2006. Their debut offering, last year’s Leatherheads, was often uneven but nevertheless unfairly ignored by the public. 

The Men Who Stare At Goats opens nationwide November 6.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: Public Enemies

Michael Mann’s true-life gangster saga amounts to a misdemeanor in his storied crime film career.

The first half of the 1930′s, when America endured the worst of the Great Depression, also gave rise to a renewed public fascination with crime and the people who committed them. History tells us that the bank robbers, outlaws, and gangsters of the era were lionized for defying the same corrupt system of laws and commerce that drove America to the brink of ruin. Outsized personalities like Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, John Dillinger, and Pretty Boy Floyd received media and public adulation, becoming in a sense the original stars of reality entertainment thanks to newsreels and an entire new genre of film.

Though by no means the first attempt at bringing the life of charismatic bank robber Dillinger to the screen, Public Enemies lacks the immediacy of the best gangster films of the 30s while at the same failing to offer perspective or context to its subject or the era to which he belonged. It’s a disappointing work by director and co-writer Michael Mann that’s further encumbered by vague and unconvincing performances from stars Johnny Depp and Christian Bale. It’s also not very entertaining to watch.

The movie begins in 1934, as Dillinger (Depp) attempts to break his mentor and several other convicts out of a bunker-like prison. The jailbreak goes wrong, but Dillinger and his gang head to Chicago, where in short order they’re robbing banks in a manner that allows Depp to jump over counters and look dashing. Their bravado rankles Bureau of Investigation chief J. Edgar Hoover, at a time when the politically rapacious bureaucrat wants Congress to allocate more funding for his fledgling agency. Hoover appoints agent Melvin Purvis (Bale) to pursue Dillinger, sending him to head the Chicago field office via a ready-made press conference.

La fille en rouge: Cotillard

Dillinger meanwhile romances a hatcheck girl named Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard, La Vie En Rose), whom he meets and decides to love in the space of a single night. She’s as restless as he is, we’re told, and swoons for Dillinger’s promises of eternal love, wealth, and adventure. “Where are you going?” she asks him, in dialogue obviously meant to evoke the romantic patter of classic Hollywood films. “Anywhere I want,” Dillinger tells her. They head for Miami, then Tucson, where Dillinger is arrested and returned to Indiana for trial. Their scenes are interspersed with Purvis’ attempts to make lawmen out of the Chicago field office’s staff of earnest but woefully inexperienced agents. After an early attempt to arrest George “Baby Face” Nelson gets an agent killed, Purvis brings in three lawmen from Texas to assist in the Dillinger manhunt.

What happens for the rest of the film should have the feel of slowly encroaching fate, or at least a collision course between the disciplined but ferocious Purvis and the flamboyant but no less ferocious Dillinger. History itself gives them a spectacular final confrontation, and Mann’s best film, Heat, had just such a trajectory. Instead Mann builds the film as a series of scenes with little or no resonance with one another. Only once, as Dillinger receives a visit from Purvis while awaiting trial, do the two men size each other up. But the scene is typical of the movie’s problem: Depp talks too much, Bale says almost nothing, and little is put forward by either actor or the plot. An important confrontation at a Wisconsin resort, in which the g-men’s bungling gets innocents killed but allows Dillinger and Nelson both to escape, never achieves its set piece potential but instead becomes mired in ear-splitting gunfire and under-lit cinematography. The gunfight was a crucial event in Dillinger’s life and in the history of American crime, but the film gives it only perfunctory attention.

Such indifference runs throughout Mann’s direction. Regarded for his work in the crime genre (Heat, Manhunter, the decades-ahead-of-its-time television series Crime Story) and known for his attention to cityscapes and the often corruptive power of urban life, both early gangsters and the cities of the Great Depression ought to play naturally to his strengths. Yet the script, co-written with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman, cannot manage to place the events in any kind of context. Worse still, the sense of sameness that pervades the look of the film – pasty faced agents and snarling gangsters, dozens of murky rooms and grimy exteriors, too many of the same characters in repetitive dialogue – keeps it from building momentum or establishing a rhythm that would help the audience immerse themselves in the narrative.

This is especially problematic in the scenes with Depp and Cotillard, all of which amount to the same conversation played out in different locales. Cotillard is a charming actress and Mann’s films are seldom sensitive to the female psyche, yet she rises to the part given her better than most. It’s easy to imagine an American actress demanding a monologue or a crying scene; here Cotillard is above such silliness. Depp, conversely, may be letting the constant critical praise lavished on him since the first Pirates of the Carribbean go to his beautfiul head. His Dillinger always seems thoughtful about something, but Depp seldom allows the audience an indication of his character’s thoughts. Dillinger – the daring, brash bank robber – remains opaque under Depp’s portrayal, except in the scenes where he’s required to be romantic or dashing. At those times Dillinger behaves suspiciously like Johnny Depp, movie star.

Regarding the other performances, Bale plays the righteous Purvis with low-key intensity, suggesting an anger or indignation that unfortunately never boils to the surface. Even after he and his men gun Dillinger down (in an overlong and unnecessarily graphic sequence), Bale’s iron curtain stays shut on the character. For as gifted and versatile an actor as he is, the indifferent portrayal here is especially frustrating. Alternately, a bright spot arrives in the form of veteran actor Peter Gerety, who barnstorms his way through a courtroom scene as Dillinger’s lawyer. Jason Clarke (Death Race) does a lot with the role of Dillinger flunkie Red Hamilton, despite having lines like “when your times up, your time’s up.” Finally, longtime Mann fans should also recognize Stephen Lang (Death of A Salesman), a mainstay of the director’s work in the 80s, as Texas Ranger Charles Winstead. Lange surfaces completely out of the grim mire only near the end, and his final scene with Cotillard at least allows the film to end with a bittersweet grace note.

- Michael Kabel
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