And why not? What's a more agreeable way to start your movie than with a little pre-movie movie before the credits even roll? It's a good bet that, if you surveyed them, four out of five moviegoers would give an enthusiastic thumbs up to those few moments of narration, or gripping action, or in media res stage-setting that, in some movies, come before we even hear the movie's name. Who doesn't enjoy getting worked into a dramatic lather before we dispense with the music cue and the formalities:

Perhaps the pre-title sequence is deemed too subtle an effect for commemoration. After all, once the whole movie's over, who can think back to when the credits rolled?

Or maybe there's some snobbery at work - a consciousness of the pre-title sequence's roots in television, where sitcoms and Mannix-level Quinn/Martin Productions have used cliffhanging, pre-commercial openers for decades.

But who is so hard-hearted as to ignore the cleverness of Reservoir Dogs' opening colloquy, or the charmingly hokey tale-spinning that opens up the classic Big Trouble in Little China? Even a highbrow movie like Badlands, generally considered a masterpiece of modern cinema, manages to sneak in a little of its poetic narration before listing The Players. Reservoir Dogs in particular announced itself as a different breed of heist movie by opening on a snatch of meandering dialogue (the effect of which is not made clear until the first post-title sequence, when we realize we will not even be shown the heist in question, thus being spared the usual course of shrill gunmen, screaming tellers and "Put the fuckin' money in the bag, bitch!"-type dialogue that tends to weigh down this sort of movie). It was an effect that worked so well Tarantino used it again, less cleverly, to start Pulp Fiction.

But tellingly, there's no pre-title number in the more mature (and woefully underrated) Jackie Brown. Nor did the Coen Brothers, who as we shall see are pretty much the masters of this technique, employ pre-credit content in their consciously serious Fargo. It seems there's something cheesily down-market about pre-title sequence, a too-obvious visceral appeal. If you happen to know the first movie ever to use this technique, please tell me, but I think it's pretty clear that the pre-title sequence was popularized in James Bond movies, all of which feature a death-defying spectacular prior to the theme song by Sheena Easton or Duran Duran or whoever is doing Bond themes these days. A straight-up appeal to the audience's gut might be good for an action picture, but who wants to look like James Bond?

But for my money, a pre-title sequence, while not always called for, is like icing on the cake, and I credit this effect with some of my happiest movie experiences. I was reeled in by the Big Clock suspense in the opening of The Hudsucker Proxy, and charmed by the snappy dialogue that opens up Miller's Crossing. But standing head and shoulders above all other opening scenes in the Coens' movies is the commencement of Raising Arizona, a narrative spanning several years of storyline and demarking, overture-style, all the movie's themes - off-center humor, repeating structures, heartbreak, fractured poetry ("The doctor explained that her inside was a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase."), and gargantuan jokes. It's a sequence that goes on so long (eleven minutes and some seconds) that you forget the credits haven't rolled yet, and when the movie's title finally appears, the effect is pure stand-up-and-cheer movie of the year stuff, the greatest pre-title sequence of them all.

... and there have been some good ones....