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Celebrating 50 Years of Saul Bass’s Phase IV

Michael Murphy and Lynn Frederick in Phase IV courtesy of Paramount Pictures

This horror movie season it will likely be common for folks to revisit a far more widely known classic celebrating a 50th anniversary: Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But another, lesser-known gem from 1974 is also celebrating the big 5-0: Saul Bass’s sole feature film credit, Phase IV. More “horror-adjacent” than Hooper’s grimy, metal-grinding horror classic, part of what makes Phase IV equally enduring is its decidedly hybrid, unclassifiable quality.

Because the film is directed by Bass, who was the father of the Hollywood title sequence, the film is a predominantly stylistic affair. If you know Saul Bass at all, it’s likely because he designed some of the most memorable title sequences in movie history: Hitchcock’s Psycho, Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm, and John Frankenheimer’s Seconds, to name a scant few. His visual style is as iconic and unmistakable as any major director. Even though his most viewed creations are only a few brief minutes in length it’s difficult to overstate the influence of his aesthetic on film and design culture at large. Bass basically birthed the art of the creative title sequence. In fact, Bass might be best classified as a creator of experimental short films, and Phase IV often has the feeling of an experimental short pulled out to feature length, albeit a quick 84 minutes.

The ant pillars in Saul bass's Phase IV
Gazing at the ant pillars in Phase IV. Photo: 1974 Paramount Pictures.

Phase IV is undeniably living in the wake of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in it’s visual and sci-fi aspirations (Bass also created the opening credits to Kubrick’s Spartacus, by the way), but is not without some truly shocking sequences that remind you it has one foot in the horror genre, as well. As a straightforward narrative about scientists who occupy a computer-enhanced research outpost in the Arizona desert after a cosmic event has rendered the ant population into a more unified, potent, and destructive whole, the film is probably not at its strongest. Yet the lead performances by Nigel Davenport as surly scientist Ernest D. Hubbs and Altman regular Michael Murphy as the younger, more idealistic “game theorist” James Lesko hold down the character-based aspects of the film with conviction and provide enough realistic grounding for the film’s strangely explicated story to hold together. Lynn Frederick plays a rancher’s daughter who ends up cloistered with the scientists in their increasingly sabotaged outpost, and while her presence first appears to be shoehorned in as a potential romantic interest for Lesko, there’s ultimately a more mythic and surprising trajectory to her storyline. Frederick is not the most seasoned actor, to be sure, but the film is oddly well served by what might otherwise be dismissed as wooden acting.

Frederick gazes at an ant in Phase IV
Lynn Frederick gazes at an ant in Phase IV. Photo: 1974 Paramount Pictures.

Even though Bass’s strength as a director may not have lied in his work with actors, Phase IV never presents itself as a film relying on anything like traditional storytelling or performance. It doesn’t even introduce human characters until around ten minutes into the film, which is largely comprised of remarkable micro photography by Ken Middleham establishing the insect world of the film. Middleham’s work is as integral to the film as the primary cinematographer, Dick Bush. Where Bush’s work is highly accomplished here, and he would go on to shoot both William Friedkin’s Sorcerer and Ken Russell’s Tommy in the following years, Middleham would make a career through shooting similar micro footage for future insect invasion-centric 70’s fare like Bug and Damnation Alley.

Making the otherwise invisible threat of the ant world visible is part of what Phase IV accomplishes so well, and the cinematography and editing is full of unusual demands that seem particularly suited to Bass and his team. The overall pleasurable frequency and effect of Phase IV exists in Bass’s orchestrated confluence of these visual ideas, experimental techniques, science fiction and horror tropes, and, possibly, a bit of spiritual transcendence. You might even add a touch of the Western genre to that mélange of elements, since the film is basically a story about an outpost under siege in the Arizona desert. So, for those keeping track…it’s sort of a psychotronic/avant-garde/sci-fi/horror/nature doc/western with a spiritual or evolutionary coda.

This spiritual or evolutionary aspect of the film is even more evident in the alternate ending to Phase IV, which is essential viewing for anyone interested. While I’m sure the Vinegar Syndrome edition of the film is excellent, I can highly recommend the 101 Films edition which is a gorgeous transfer and includes Bass’s longer, original ending. It’s difficult to understand why this would be scrapped initially, since it’s simply a stronger, more satisfying version of what the film already offers. Bass’s short films (also included on the 101 Films edition) reveal even further Bass’s sensibility and deep interest in the human relationship to nature, history, and the popular arts. There are only a handful of short films, but they truly augment the experience of Phase IV, particularly the two shorts he made in the years prior, The Searching Eye (1969) and (a short that won him an Academy Award) Why Man Creates (1968).

One interesting aspect revealed by the extended ending of Phase IV is how it amplifies the influence of Salvador Dali. Given that my last piece for Film Obsessive was a review of Quentin Dupieux’s new surrealist comedy Daaaaaali!, I’d like to pull again at the thread of the far-reaching influence of the opening sequence in Dali’s famous collaboration with Luis Bunuel, Un Chien Andalou. Most everyone has seen it, or at least winced and turned away quickly from it: a scene featuring Bunuel himself as a barber of ocular liberation slicing open the eyeball of a young female subject in close-up. It’s the genesis of Surrealist films, and the instigator of an eventual cinematic obsession with gore.

While that image haunts the movies repeatedly, Phase IV lifts a different iconic image from that film of ants crawling out of the middle of a hand (even used in some of the publicity, as well as the cover of the 101 Films edition). Bass uses this specific image, as well as some dream landscapes in the final sequence that are very Dali-esque, to pay homage to his influence. Bass’s cinematic language, overall, is built even more directly out of the overlapping fades and disorienting montage of Un Chien Andalou than anything like traditional Hollywood story editing, and the over-indulgence in this style may have been why the original ending was cut down, even though it would seem suited to a film that mostly played the bottom half of double features (with James Caan in The Gambler) in 1974.

Ants crawling out of the hand in Un Chien Andalou
Ants crawl from the hand in Dali and Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929)

It’s unfortunate Bass only made this one feature film, because his obvious fascination with science and humanity and “what’s next?” could have yielded something like a new evolution of genre, which is what the film hints at in its most mesmerizing moments. That fascination and spirit of cinematic searching also feels sadly lacking from movies today. His work has a genuinely curious and uncynical quality to it, and you can sense that reflected in the character played by Murphy in Phase IV, who plays the game the ants want to play right up to the final, titular phase of the film.

In the end, Phase IV is essentially a ’70s elaboration on the atomic age monster films of the 50’s, taking the “giant insect invasion” premise from films like the 1954 giant ant thriller Them! into new visual, almost philosophical, territory. While Bass’s film is equal parts trippy and creepy in an unmistakably early-70’s fashion, it has little interest in the trend marked by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left toward movie monsters being more commonly depicted as the deranged fringes of humanity. By comparison, Bass was far more interested in a rather hopeful and intellectually curious human component at the exact same time horror cinema was testing the limits of how dark and nihilistic it could get. Still, Phase IV has some strange and unsettling horrors embedded within it, and it might provide the perfect, off-kilter balance to your horror movie marathon this season. But, because it’s a film that defies strict genre conventions and offers a rare glimpse into the mind of a rare artist, it needs to be rediscovered and celebrated on any occasion.

Written by Jason J Hedrick

Author of ECSTATIC Screen Notes, co-founder of the "Cult-O-Rama" film series in Pittsburgh, sometimes educator, sometimes playwright. Lives in the dark.

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