The 25th Hour (1967) title sequence
Jean Fouchet’s title sequence for the 1967 film The 25th Hour, an anti-war film set in World War II Hungary and Germany. I’ll admit I haven’t seen the film (it received poor reviews when it opened and seems to still disappoint audiences today, judging from its Letterboxd reviews), but the title sequence is classic Fouchet: a simple type treatment and graphic premise brought to life with beautiful colors and in-camera effects wizardy.
I’ve never been able to find anything precise about how Fouchet got these kind of undulating type effects (which occur at least briefly in most of his titles from the 1960s), but it definitely involves high-contrast film and shooting type through a liquid of some kind.
Credit for the typeface identification goes to Florian Hardwig, who answered my question on fontid.co.
1 Comment on “The 25th Hour (1967) title sequence”
Thanks for posting this here, too, Rob!
As mentioned on fontid.co, Abilene is a phototype interpretation of a French Clarendon that was shown by Lettergraphics in California in 1968, which seems to be a match in terms of time and place. It has that Q and R, and other details match, too. Attached is a glyph set as well as a showing in which I stretched the caps and numerals to 300% of their width. Note that the starting sample was pretty small. If you started from a larger size, I reckon that hairlines would stay thinner.
Abilene glyph set from an undated Typeshop catalog
Abilene’s caps and numerals, stretched digitally to 300% of the original width