Opening Titles and Song: The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015)

As we’re now knee-deep into what I refer to as The Slide¹, am trying to clean out my drafts bin before the year runs out. This one will be given over to another fine opening titles sequence² by an English film director-producer-screenwriter noted for them. Guy Ritchie is also a favorite of mine due to his well-known British gangster films, and later Sherlock Holmes starring Robert Downey Jr. Here, we’ll look at his translation of an old American TV program, The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

For those among you who’ve not heard of The Man From U.N.C.L.E.³, it was a television series⁴ inspired by the sudden popularity of the James Bond OO7 novels⁵ and movies of the early ’60s. The organization’s primary adversary was THRUSH⁶, whose sole aim was to conquer the world. It was considered so dangerous that even governments who were ideologically opposed to each other⁷ cooperated in forming and operating the U.N.C.L.E. organization.

Ritchie’s film adaptation and script concentrated on the organization’s origin, story-wise.

That put the 1963 proceedings solidly at the height of the Cold War, which is what the sequence highlights via its graphics and fitting music. Title designer Michael Bruce Ellis⁸ set everything in motion with red-on-black illustrations of the studio and production company logos that transition into a single thin band that angles to supplement those viewing. One that expands to display the duotones of the time that put the European post-war terrain into context.

Intermixing its movie credits among the historical newspaper headlines and maps denoting the tension of the new political landscape⁹ of former WW II allies.

The segment elegantly showcased the legacy of the war, along with J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project that birthed the threat of nuclear annihilation. Once the hostility is attested to via its monochromatic images and clips, the title designer’s intent of graphing those lines comes into clearer focus. Sharply emphasizing the boundaries of the East and West that symbolized the Cold War as the crossroad of the Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie materializes.

All the important historical facts juxtaposed to Henry Cavill’s character making his way through East Germany with the KGB (care of Armie Hammer) hot on his trail.

Am saddened to hear Roberta’s wonderful voice has been silenced due to ALS.

Which brings us to the timely, if not contemporary¹⁰ for ’63, needle-drop that vocalizes the sequence to an extraordinary degree. Compared to What the Jazz/Soul/Protest number made famous later in the ’60s by Les McCann and Eddie Harris, given a sultry but a no less impassioned cover by Roberta Flack¹¹. While the song’s original target was the Vietnam War and President Lyndon B. Johnson with its searing lyrics, the use of Flack’s rendition in the sequence shifted the perspective intuitively.

While the titles’ intro oozed Sixties cool, its artful pictorials and heartfelt music took simultaneous aim at the present peril while giving one hell of a history lesson the audience wouldn’t soon forget.