The Birds

Causing a flap

A beautiful socialite Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) arrives in the small town of Bodega Bay, ostensibly to deliver two lovebirds to someone. While out on a boat, she is attacked by a gull. She meets up with Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) with whom she had a previous encounter in San Francisco. He invites her to his young sister Catherine's (Veronica Cartwright) birthday party the next day. She seeks out lodging in the nearby home of Annie Heyworth (Suzanne Pleshette). That night, a bird smashes against a window. At the party the next day, a flock of bird descend on the children and attack them.

			Alfred Hitchcock made The Birds in 1963, arguably at the height of his fame. His three previous pictures were Psycho (1960), North by Northwest (1959) and Vertigo (1958), and during the Fifties, he also made Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954) and To Catch a Thief (1955). It seemed that he could master any genre to which he turned his attention; suspense, horror, comedy,romance or a mixture of all. He was fascinated with the dark consequences of apparently minor human failings. In Psycho, white-collar crook Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) pays the ultimate price as a result of her theft,
while the seemingly innocuous habit of bored invalid Jeff Jeffries (James Stewart) leads him to a very dark place indeed in Rear Window. Hitchcock's work could be light and humorous (To Catch a Thief) but he preferred his comedy black (The Trouble with Harry) or even macabre.
He used romance to explore the obsessive (and therefore disturbing) side of love, such as Vertigo and , in a perverse way, Psycho. The Birds shares many of Hitchcock's trademarks.It is a horror story but the cause of the horror is so banal, so
Portrait of a serial killer		ordinary, that nobody can believe it to be true. It is also a tale of obsession. Mitch Brenner is a highly successful lawyer and very eligible bachelor but spends most of his weekends at home with his possessive mother Lydia (Jessica Tandy). He is powerful and self-confident , and is surrounded by women who care for him. Aside from his mother, Annie Heyworth , Melissa's landlady for the weekend, was once Mitch's girlfriend, and moved from San Francisco to Bodego Bay just to be near him, after they broke up. Melissa is also attracted to Mitch, and her errand of love-birds is merely an excuse to meet him again.

Even though Melissa makes a good impression on Mitch, she receives a much cooler reception from his mother Lydia. She finds out that Annie's relationship with Mitch had cooled only after his mother had voiced her disapproval of her. Melissa is beautiful, rich and famous and has led a privileged existence, but feels trapped in the glare of the public eye (much like the caged lovebirds she has brought to Bodega Bay).

The psychological elements of the story are consigned to the background once the bird attacks begin. There is no real attempt to explain why the birds turn nasty, though there is a suggestion that perhaps the caged lovebirds may be the source of the problem. It is this element of the story that has dated badly. One can only imagine the gleeful sequences Hitchcock would have devised if he had the benefit of 1990's special effect technology. Nevertheless, many of bird scenes are chilling, particularly when they gather silently at a school playground before attacking the schoolchildren. Indeed, Hitchcock anticipates by decades big-budget horror movies of the Seventies (such as Swarm) and also sci-fi movies such as the Alien series and Jurassic Park. (Of course, Hitchcock was cleverly updating the familiar scenario of the Western, by substituting Mitch and the others for the embattled homesteaders, and normally harmless birds for ferocious Indians). In fact, there is a direct link between The Birds and Alien, since Veronica Cartwright plays a screaming (and for the most part, fleeing) character in both movies.

Despite Hitchcock's skill, The Birds is not one of his better movies, though memorable nevertheless. Neither Taylor nor Hedren are particularly strong leading characters. Taylor's character should exude power and charm, but comes across as bland. Tippi Hedren made her debut here as a leading lady but doesn't measure up when compared to previous Hitchcock female leads, like Grace Kelly and Kim Novak. Some of the action is a bit hokum too. In the history of hysterical leading ladies doing something stupid to advance the story, Tippi deserves an honourable mention. In one scene, she opens a door slightly to glance inside, screams in fright when she sees it is full of birds, and then manages to fall inside the room, so that her body blocks the door. I suspect an unfinished page in the script. There is also a bizarre scene with an ornithologist who just appears to order to reel off a list of statistics about birds. It is also difficult to overlook the creaking special effects - both the super-imposed and the mechanical birds are not very realistic. Now, if Gus Van Sant had decided to re-make The Birds with state-of-the-art special effects and strong leading roles, instead of messing around with a masterpiece such as Psycho, he might have actually done something useful.

Directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock.

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