THE BIRDS
B
USA (119 mi) 1963 d: Alfred
Hitchcock
While we were shaping
the screenplay, there was no talk at all of symbolism. There was talk about
character depth, but Hitch’s real concerns about the shallowness of the people
we’d chosen did not emerge until after I’d delivered the first draft and he’d
solicited opinions from everyone but his barber. The inherent problem, of
course, was that the characters in a screwball comedy have no depth. They
merely represent conflicting attitudes. We were trying to tell a story lighter
than air. The irony was that the terror later comes from the air. As far as I
was concerned, everything that preceded that first gull hitting Melanie on the
head was pure gossamer.
—Ed McBain, aka Evan Hunter, screenwriter adapting the
Daphne Du Maurier short story
Watch the
skies!
—anonymous quote from Christian Nyby/Howard Hawks’ THE THING
FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951)
I have never known
birds of different species to flock together. The very concept is unimaginable.
Why, if that happened, we wouldn't stand a chance! How could we possibly hope
to fight them?
—Mrs. Bundy (Ethel Griffies)
This is Hitchcock’s nightmarish, apocalyptic, end of the
world scenario as told with a great deal of amusement and delight, where it’s
something of an experimental special effects feature without a musical score,
but nearly all the pulsating terror is initiated by a horrifying sound design
of bird screeches and squawks obtained by running the tape backwards and
forwards, along with weird, special effects images of out of control, swooping
and attacking birds. There’s very little acting to speak of outside of
Suzanne Pleshette as Annie Hayworth, a former love interest who’s outstanding
as always in a minor role, and an especially wonderful turn from Ethel Griffies
as Mrs. Bundy, a grand actress who began acting in movies in 1917 before her
career took off with the arrival of talking pictures, one of those nosy,
busybody characters that Hitchcock loved so much, playing the local
ornithologist, a supposed specialist on the behavior of birds, who spouts out
bird magazine statistics from the back of her head to prove her point, yet who
ends up cowering in a sheltered hallway right along with the rest of them after
telling the townsfolk they have nothing whatsoever to worry about, that bird
species never flock together and would never attack humans. Coming on the
heels of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960),
this is really meant to be a scare-a-thon, as there’s little character
development to this already barebones story, adapted from a Daphne Du Maurier
short story, though almost nothing remains of the original story, which takes
place in Britain, except the bizarre behavior of attacking birds. Du
Maurier also provided the source material for a Hitchcock pirate adventure, JAMAICA
INN (1939), the Gothic melodrama Rebecca
(1940) which won an Oscar for Best Picture, and the highly regarded,
psychologically disturbing Nicolas Roeg film Don't
Look Now (1973). While Du Maurier
wrote suspense novels, thought to be excellent reads while on holiday, where in
a travel book The West Country: Bill of Portland to the Isles of Scilly, author
Susan Kemp-Wheeler claimed “her work was thought to belong to a bygone era,”
but she was a first-rate story teller with an exceptional ability “to transport
the reader to another place.”
The movie actually begins in a bird shop in San Francisco
where all the birds are safely locked in their cages. Hitchcock has found
another Grace Kelly, icy blond, look-alike in Tippi Hedren (mother of actress
Melanie Griffith), discovered swaying heads as a fashion model in a diet coke
commercial, which is exactly what Hitchcock was looking for apparently, where
THE BIRDS is her first venture into acting, playing the pampered, but coolly
attractive socialite daughter of one of the owners of a leading San Francisco
newspaper, starring again in his next film Marnie
(1964). It’s such a pleasure to see Hitchcock return to California
locations, especially San Francisco once again after the success of Vertigo
(1958), as it’s also where he shot his final film FAMILY PLOT (1976), while the
crop duster scene in NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959) was shot near Bakersfield in the
San Joaquin Valley located just over 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles in the
central part of the state, but also Santa Rosa, the small town featured in Shadow
of a Doubt (1943), is a mere 20 miles East of the Bodega Bay location used
for THE BIRDS, which is a picturesque town 40 miles north of San Francisco on
scenic Highway 1 along the coast, where appreciable highlights of the film are
the sweeping panoramic ocean vistas, also the small town feel. The unique
convertible car driven by Hedren is a 1950’s series Aston Martin DB2/4
drop-head coupe (988.jpg),
owned by a collector who totalled the car two years after the film was
made. The initial encounter between Hedren as Melanie Daniels and leading
man Rod Taylor as Mitch Brenner in the bird shop is interesting only because
they seemingly detest one another. Nonetheless, it’s enough for Hedren to
drop whatever she was doing, and on impulse place a special order for “love
birds” and drive to Bodega Bay the next day to deliver them as a surprise gift
for Brenner’s little sister’s 11-year old birthday. Seen as a woman who’s
used to getting what she wants, advertising it all over a small town is not
usually the wise thing to do, especially considering one of the first people
she befriends searching for Brenner is Annie Hayworth, who doesn’t seem the
least bit surprised, as it likely fits the pattern of his previous romantic
affairs as well. Taking a boat across the bay, she delivers the birds in
secret, but she’s spotted getting attacked by a gull on her return trip to
town, arriving to shore with blood dripping from her forehead, where of course
she walks straightaway right into the middle of a crowded restaurant. The
commotion she causes must have delighted the director.
Melanie is invited to dinner at the Brenner estate which has
beautiful ocean vistas, where a stern Jessica Tandy is Mitch’s mother, Lydia,
something of a control freak trying to keep her son at home, where it appears
she has the exact same hair style as Melanie, and Veronica Cartwright is the appreciative
young sister Cathy who loves the birds. Dinner conversation is
interrupted when a flurry of birds stream into their home through the fireplace
like frenzied bats, literally overrunning the place in a matter of seconds,
where they all have to escape behind closed doors until the surprise attack is
over. As it’s late, Melanie spends the night at Annie’s house, the town
schoolteacher living across the street from the school. The next day
Lydia is psychologically shell-shocked after discovering a local farmer dead in
his home with his eyes pecked out, surrounded by dead birds. Melanie
offers to pick up Cathy from school choir practice, but as she waits for them,
she notices the gathering birds, which start out barely noticeable, but literally
overrun all the possible perches and ledges for them to stand on, becoming an
ominous presence. The two women attempt to accompany the kids back to
their own homes, but they are viciously attacked along the way, literally
fleeing for their lives under a ferociously aggressive assault. Of course
no one in town believes them, especially Mrs. Bundy, a chatty know-it-all who
prefers to impress the laymen with her fascinating ornithological knowledge,
none of which helps explain why the birds are attacking schoolchildren and
murdering farmers, until another assault takes place right outside the
restaurant window, causing more inexplicable blood and mayhem that feels more
like an attack from outer space, as these birds, literally flooding the screen,
use themselves as missiles as they dive-bomb human targets. Mitch gets
them all back to his home where he boards up all the doors and windows,
preventing any outside light or visibility. Then they sit silently and
wait, cut off from the outside world, where there’s literally nothing for them
to do but feel petrified with fear. When another assault makes its way
through a hole in the roof, they are literally engulfed by the birds, where
Melanie passes out from the viciousness of the attack, feeling very much like
the inexplicable small town hysteria in another sleepy coastline community that
is suddenly disrupted by the eerie presence of John Carpenter’s THE FOG (1980),
another creepy film using striking California oceanfront locations just north
of San Francisco at Inverness and Pt. Reyes, former hang outs of Jerry Garcia
and the Grateful Dead. This film doesn’t so much end as the humans
quietly and respectfully surrender, as they feebly attempt to make their way
out of town in a state of battle weary exhaustion, hoping to remove the wounded
before the next attack. One of the endings considered by Hitchcock was a
shot of the Golden Gate Bridge completely covered by birds, but the ambiguous
nature of why and what it all means is intentionally left unclear for each
viewer to figure out, though the film typifies many of the 50’s and 60’s sci-fi
invasion movies, such as the original THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951) or
GODZILLA (1954), many of which envision doomsday scenarios for the end of the
world.
Note—the Hitchcock sighting appears early in the film where
Hitchcock can be seen walking his own Highland terriers, Stanley and Geoffrey,
out of the San Francisco Union Square pet store.
