How about Boogie Nights? The way the camera flies into the restaurant and zips around, introducing all the characters, without any (apparent) cut or edit. How’d they do that? It looks like a single shot.
Citizen Kane!!!
The gates and fences. The move up to the lone lit window. ‘Rosebud’. The dropped snowglobe. Then the movie news.
Fight Club!
We start on a synapse in “Jack”'s brain and zoom rapidly through his brain to the hectic soundtrack only to come out a sweat pore and down the length of a gun which we see is sticking in his mouth …
“With a gun in your mouth, you only speak in vowels.”
The opening credits to Superman are still quite impressive almost 25 years later.
If the credits for Psycho are the ones I’m remembering, I like those a lot, too.
I second Fight Club. It is by far the most incredible beginning I’ve ever experienced.
The title sequence for David Cronenberg’s Crash is pretty cool.
Fight Club’s opening sequence reminded me of Look Who’s Talking with better music.
The opening sequence for The Avengers, of a couple of years ago (that featured Sean Connery as a mad weather tyrant). Graphically, it was a kind of an animated cross between nineties rave graphics and sixties psychedelia… quite an aye opener.
Pity the rest of the movie sucked rocks.
Well, I have to put in a whole class nomination for the Bond Films. In between the opening action scenes, and the “as close to nudity as possible without actualy nudity” credit scenes, there’s something of an artform to them.
Of course, I also loved the spoof of them in “Spy Hard” which ends with Wierd Al’s head exploding… as with The Avengers, pity the rest of the movie wasn’t any good.
Once again, a vote for Raising Arizona. It was the first movie I thought of before opening this thread.
I will also add the opening scene for Mars Attacks- it’s a stampede of cows on fire, which has nothing to do with the movie really, but is visually very eerie and beautiful.
Conan the Barbarian - the scenes of Conan’s father building the sword with Basil Poledouris’ music pounding in the background…incredible. In fact, the whole incorporation of music in that movie still knocks my socks off.
That’s not classical music, that’s an instrumental version of the love song Try a Little Tenderness, which is quite funny given the sexual imagery of the refueling.
Another vote for Saul Bass: The Man With the Golden Arm, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and Walk on the Wild Side in particular.
Here’s a vote for The Wild Bunch.
The film opens with brilliant freeze-frame credits. As the Bunch ride into town disguised as U.S. Cavalry soldiers, the frame freezes into a black and white grainy image when each of the credits appear, then unfreezes to continue the action in color. The sequence culminates as the Bunch bursts into the bank they’re going to rob, Pike (William Holden) grabs a bank clerk, lifts him from his chair and tosses him across the room. Then in closeup, he snarls, “If they move, kill 'em.” The frame freezes on Pike’s face, and then appears the final credit: “Directed by Sam Peckinpah.”
Gives me goose bumps every time I see it!
I’ll second Star Wars. I love the movie and the scrolling text giving way to this ENORMOUS spaceship was just amazing.
Someone mentioned Superman: is that credit sequence about eight hours long? I thought it would NEVER end. It seems like everyone down to the key grip got a screen all to themselves. I understand the trip from Krypton to Earth is long, but I wasn’t prepared for it to be in real-time.
Raising Arizona is terrific, but one that hasn’t been mentioned yet is Die Hard III - with a Vengence, the typical movie opening (song, “Summer in the City”) with camera panning around New York in Summertime, where you can almost feel the heat eminate from the sidewalks, panning around, streets, more streets BOOM there goes, what was it, Bloomingdales?
Superman has the record for longest credit sequence, at twelve minutes.
Shaft The opening sets the tone for the entire movie. Plus the famous exchange between Issac Hayes and the backup singers (you know which one I’m talking about).
The Towering Inferno Alright, it’s five minutes of a helicopter flying over various bits of Northern CA scenery, but John Williams’ musical score is one of his best.
Psycho Same reasons given above by someone else.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
When I first saw this, I was breathless by the time the opening sequence ended.
Although the ‘suspended-in-mid-air’ visual effect comes up too often in music videos and films nowadays, I never get tired of watching Carrie-Ann Moss kick some serious butt in the opening sequence. Best of all, she does it all in tight black leather.
I’d have to say Fight Club as well, and Seven, both are some messed up sh!t, but fantastic to watch. Those come immediately to mind when you say killer openings. Another vote for Contact as well.
Dogma’s opening credits are great as well–in a totally different way than the others I’ve mentioned, and I’ve always loved the opening sequence to Hard Day’s Night (the movie).
I’m surprised nobody has mentioned Saul Bass’s work on the James Bond films.
I also like the opening of Magnolia, with Ricky Jay’s narration of three instances of coincidence, one of the film’s themes, and then launching into Aimee Mann’s cover of “One” over the opening credits.
The pre-credit sequence of Cube, showing a guy getting turned into sushi, is totally effective in establishing that you’re watching a horror movie.
I also gotta give props to Bernard Herrmann’s score and the graphics for the opening credits of North By Northwest.
In addition to A Hard Day’s night, the opening sequence of Help with Leo McKern’s hilarious performance as Klang, the High Priest, throwing darts at a movie screen showing the Beatles singing the eponymous song, is absolutely brilliant.