The Birds (1963)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Film Review

Buoyed by the immense success of Psycho (1960), Alfred Hitchcock chose to stick with the horror genre for his next film, The Birds, which was to provide one of cinema's most chilling apocalyptic visions of the future.  Like Psycho, The Birds begins slowly, heading down what looks like a familiar cosy lane, and then suddenly it veers off sharply to the left, becoming a completely different kind of film to the one any audience might have expected.   This is Hitchcock's most horrifying and darkest films, because it deals with the bleakest of subjects - the extinction of the human race.

The Birds is based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier, which Hitchcock had originally intended for his TV series "Alfred Hitchcock Presents".  The screenplay was written by Evan Hunter, who is better known as the novelist Ed McBain.  This was to be Hitchcock's most technically challenging film, making use of state of the art special effects which look pretty good even by today's standards.  Some of the film's most ambitious sequences (such as the one where the running children are attacked by birds) were realised using a sodium vapour variant of the "travelling mat" or "blue screen" process that had been widely used in film and television to create the illusion of objects flying.  The sodium vapour approach was far more difficult to set up but avoided the "fringing" defect associated with blue screen.  These effects earned the film an Oscar nomination, but as it turned out the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences felt that Joseph L. Mankiewicz's historical epic Cleopatra (1963) should be the recipient of the Best Special Effects award that year - an outcome that is incomprehensible to anyone who has ever seen both films.

The Birds has some of the most disturbing and suspenseful sequences of any Hitchcock film.  Most memorable is the manically edited sequence in which Tippi Hedren is mauled for what seems like an eternity by psychopathic birds in a creepy attic.  This manages to surpass the famous Janet Leigh murder scene in Psycho in its visceral shock value and relentless brutality.  The sequence took five days to film and Hedren (in her first major film role) had mistakenly believed that mechanical bird models, not real birds, would be used, right up until the day of the first shoot.  The actress was so drained after having had live birds thrown at her for the best part of a week that she was not well enough to appear in some of the later scenes, so these were shot using a double.

One of the things which most contributes to the unsettling and very distinctive mood of The Birds is its eerie electronic effects (produced by a device called a mixtrautonium), which are used in place of a conventional film score.  These effects mimic the sound of birds and are played over sequences where there is no human speech.  This, together with the dominating bird's eye shots, adds to the impression of the birds rapidly gaining ascendancy over human beings.

The ending of The Birds has been criticised for its apparent ambiguity, although from the final shot, in which thousands of birds assemble to watch the humans make a last dash for freedom, it is self-evident how the story will pan out.  The immense poetry and horror of that final shot contains within it a powerful statement on the transience of things.  We may think we are secure, but there will come a day when humans will no longer be the masters of the Earth.  Our end may come in a million years' time - or it may be tomorrow.

Film Synopsis

On a whim, bored socialite Melanie Daniels decides to pay a home visit to Mitch Brenner, a lawyer she met by chance in a San Francisco bird shop.  Shortly after arriving at Brenner's home in Bodega Bay, a small coastal town in northern California, Melanie is attacked by a seagull.  Mitch invites her to stay at his house, which he shares with his mother and his younger sister Cathy.  The next day, at a children's outdoor party to celebrate Cathy's birthday, there is another avian attack - by several different species of birds.   Melanie and Mitch become increasingly concerned that the birds appear to be turning against mankind.  Sure enough, a day or two later, the birds make an assault of even greater ferocity on the town, killing dozens of people and causing destruction to property.  One drunken man proclaims: "It's the end of the world...!"  Maybe it is - for its human population...