Our Avian Friends Attack

Rating: 7/10 (11 January 2007)

The Birds is one of the very few Alfred Hitchcock films that owes more to special effects than to any great story line or acting performances. It's those birds turning on mankind in Bodega Bay that you come to see this film and that's what you get.
Those of the lesser species that mankind hasn't killed off live either in harmony with man or in an undeclared truce. What if a species all of a sudden, previously docile, decides to turn on man? Birds are something we may like or dislike but we do take their passivity in most cases for granted.
It's not hunting or preying birds like the eagle and hawk that do the turning in Bodega Bay, it's scavenger birds like gulls and crows. And they're working together with a kind of unseen intelligence guiding them. That's what's most scary.
The human players Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren, Suzanne Pleshette, Jessica Tandy and the rest are really of little importance. Everyone does their part well, but their little stories fade to insignificance. The Birds starts as almost a Doris Day/Rock Hudson type comedy as Rod Taylor comes into a pet shop and mistakes Tippi for a salesperson. They have their Rock and Doris like banter and she gets his license number and follows him down to Bodega Bay, a sleepy little California coast village.
The way Hitchcock made Santa Rosa a part of Shadow of a Doubt, he does the same here with Bodega Bay. Unlike in Shadow of a Doubt though the town as well as The Birds dwarf the plot of the film.
As Rod and Tippi do their Rock/Doris thing The Birds start their attacks and turn the place into panic city. As it probably would in any situation. What's really spooky about the whole thing is that Hitchcock leaves it totally unresolved. We don't know what the town will do about these aggressive avians. Or for that matter what mankind itself will do.