"Cover your faces! Cover your eyes!"

Rating: 8/10 (11 March 2001)

WARNING: REVIEW CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS
After slating The Birds fifteen months ago on the IMDb I have to concede that I was talking complete nonsense. The Birds is perhaps a film that has to be watched more than once to be fully appreciated, a factor which does it few favours with a casual audience.
Maybe it comes from years of being told the Hitchcock films are suspenseful thrillers. An accurate description, but one that fails to take into account their camp, knowing humour. As a result the twenty and thirty somethings that didn't get to see them firsthand may be disappointed.
Tippi Hedren is a little wooden, as were the majority of Hitchcock's girls, and is caked in soft focus. The initial storyline sees her following Rod Taylor all the way from San Francisco to Bodega Bay. She goes to a lot of trouble just to get into a bloke's pants, doesn't she? The eerie mood is actually enhanced by the obvious filmed backdrops Hedren has to drive/sail in front of. It's not until the twenty-five minute point that Hedren's head is pecked by a gull.
The direction in terms of shots is magnificent, and the film's potency can be directly paralleled with the trailer which Hitchcock himself performed. A five-minute monologue, which tends to go on a bit, then culminates in a genuinely unsettling scene where his caged bird draws blood. It's the meandering pace of the trailer and the film that makes the eventual shocks all the more disturbing. And making you care about the characters as three-dimensional people (the first attack proper is over fifty minutes in) is a masterstroke.
Some of the effects to achieve the attacks may now be a little obvious, but in combining them together it works wonders. In fact, the iconography of this film is arguably more imitated than any other Hitchcock movie, including Psycho. Unusually gory for the director, its total absence of incidental music, save for a mosaic of birdcall, is also startling. The clever avoidance of any kind of explanation is the key to its real success, carefully avoiding science fiction territory. When told there's no reason for the attacks, Taylor replies "it's happening  isn't that a reason?"
Some genius scenes  the light innocence of child song juxtaposed with the massing crows; the unexpected horror of the gouged eyes; a beautiful, silent aerial shot of the garage, gradually filled with squawking gulls  are vital to the film's worth. The understated conclusion, meanwhile, is probably one of the ten best climaxes cinema has to offer. It gives not even the comfort of an "end" caption, leaving the effects of the film to continue unresolved in the mind of the audience...