Great title sequences and opening scenes

The opening sequence from "Walk on the Wild Side."

Double Indemnity features a great opening, credits and opening scene.

Even better opening scene after great credits: The Killers (1946 version).

Written On The Wind: pure Fifties melodrama, with stunning Technicolor.

High Noon. 'Nuff said. Perfection.

Gunfight At the O.K. Corral is yet another western with memorable credits and opening sequence, though Mel Brooks' satire of it has maybe hurt it somewhat retroactively.

The Big Country is yet another western with rousing credits and opening sequence.

The Guns Of Navarone. Beautiful titles and opening sequence: dignified, understated (for its time); a classy opening to a classy classic film.

 Great mention... Many of Fullers striking opening title sequences are splashed across the screen, must have been a knockout in a cinema , the sensationalist headlines he would write when working as a crime reporter for the exploitive tabloid the New York Evening Graphic no doubt a big influence on his unique creative style.          

The rooftop chase scene in Verigo is excellent. (As is the one in The Matrix!)

Aguirre, Wrath of the Gods with the horse party descending the hill through the mist looks terrific.

The Palm Beach Story - This one has the antic sense of humor of writer/director Preston Sturges all over it. To the alternating strains of "The William Tell Overture" and "Here Comes the Bride," frantic efforts to reach an elaborate church wedding, where minister and assemblage are waiting, are intercut as the credits roll: Joel McCrea dressing in the back seat of a speeding cab; Claudette Colbert in lingerie, bound, gagged and locked in a closet; another Colbert in bridal gown dashing from the apartment - where the first Colbert is detained - and hailing her own cab; a maid who repeatedly wanders into the scene and drops in a dead faint; the breathless arrivals of McCrea and the gowned Colbert at the church and, as the credits conclude, an overlay appears: "And they lived happily ever after." And then another: "Or did they?"

It all plays as though we've suddenly walked in upon the climactic moments of a film that's just ending, and as the main action begins, we find ourselves dropped into a story commencing five years later, with no references to any of the foregoing. Are any explanations or details of all that manic activity ever revealed? If you've never seen it, I'm not telling. But the brisk and droll hour-and-a-half that follows make more than worthwhile watching in order to find out.

Psycho - The bold visuals of Saul Bass title sequences are always arresting. In shades of black, white and grey, multiple parallel lines visually invoking Bernard Herrmann's all-string music score rush onto the screen from either direction: pursuing, tearing and stabbing at the credits, themselves flying in and out from left and right in rhythm with the urgently driving score.

Chinatown - Another wonder of geometric design, this time simple, elegant and stationary. Framed with soft edges at the center of the wide Panavision screen appears a vintage, sepia-tinted Paramount logo, followed by credits in period-appropriate lettering also soft-framed in 1.33 against a likewise-tinted background of broad and shaded diagonal stripes, and accompanied by the melancholy trumpet, romantic strings and moody piano of Jerry Goldsmith's score. A vertical crawl begins, inducing the optical illusion of movement in that background as the eye follows the text upward, and the cumulative effect seductively pulls the viewer into the story's 1937 time frame before a minute of its action has begun to unfold.

Bullitt - As cinematographer William A. Fraker's camera wanders and prowls through the darkened Chicago offices of brothers Pete and John Ross, major credits appear one by one in white lettering and then slowly drift out of frame vertically or horizontally, leaving behind their transparent ghosts through which can be seen the next shot in the sequence, each of which is revealed in full as those ghost letters sail toward the viewer, growing larger until they envelop the screen. Lalo Schifrin's jazz-based score, cool yet ominous, compliments the successive visuals: a row of black-hatted mob types looms outside the windows; a desperate man hides within behind a desk; floodlights from outside suddenly illuminate the office; the man tosses a smoke canister...a window is shattered...gunshots are heard...the man flees...

Together, title designer Pablo Ferro, cinematographer Fraker and director Peter Yates are dropping clues to the explanation of the puzzling mysteries that will follow involving a mob embezzler and informant, an ambitious political aspirant, hit men, impersonations and murders, all of which detective Frank Bullitt is determined to unravel.                                      

I'm honored (and it's especially nice of you to be so tolerant of my run-on sentences).

I was immediately and absolutely bowled over by The Stunt Man from the very first viewing (the two friends with whom I first saw it had divergent reactions: one hated it passionately; the other couldn't make up his mind whether he loved or hated it). As mystifying as my friends' reactions have been the sparse big-screen careers of director Richard Rush and screenwriter Lawrence Marcus. None of the other work by either had shown me much, but this one project seems to have inspired and captivated them (just as it does me with each viewing). Its audience-teasing explorations of the respective natures of reality and illusion continue to fascinate me.    

I hope you will. I was most appreciative of the concise yet comprehensive thoughts you so beautifully laid out in our recent exchanges about themes of redemption in films, and had so wished to respond with something intelligent enough to be worthy of them, but you covered it so well, I honestly couldn't think of a thing to add.     

Thanks, and good call on Fuller's crime reporting background and the old (and legendary) New York Graphic, rather the newspaper of record of the Jazz Age.