Saul Bass invented the title sequence as a design discipline. Before Bass, credits were a curtain raiser — static text projected before the film began. Bass understood that the opening could do what the poster does: establish the film's emotional and conceptual territory before the first scene.
Anatomy of a Murder is his most formally precise work. A single disassembled body, rendered in paper cutout on grey, reassembled piece by piece to Duke Ellington's jazz score. The concept literalizes the title exactly — anatomy, dissection, reconstruction. The form is the content.
Notice the rhythm: forms appear and disappear on musical cues, building tension through accumulation. This is typography and composition working as motion — not decorated, not animated for its own sake, but driven entirely by meaning.