But birds ARE really creepy ...

Rating: 7/10 (30 January 2015)

... if you think about it. Total freedom due to their power of flight, eyesight many more times powerful than ours, little beady eyes ... well. I raised birds for decades and can say that without a doubt, the eyes are the first thing birds peck out, whether fatally as in this film, or to the point of blinding, as in how my chickens and finches attacked dying or simply ill birds in my flocks. It happened in my aviary.
But back to The Birds; I saw it again after some years and welcomed the buildup of suspense such as the gas station flameout, while having forgotten the love story. It's a usual love story, filled with stupid/silly things we do and say when that old attraction starts. In this case, attraction escalates to a life and death situation, with manly Taylor saving his entire family for as far as we can see. What happened on the way to Santa Rosa, we can only guess.
Effects were all right for the period, with visible lines about the birds' outlines, which now I realize were from green screen. As a kid, they looked weirdly ghostlike. What impressed more as a former aviary keeper was the incredible patience which the bird wranglers must have employed to keep those birds in position! As for the actors, I felt sorry for Pleshette and her devotion to Taylor which has shaped her life and death, Hedren whose lack of a reliable mother seems to be filled with Tandy's solid presence, and little Cartwright, whose 11 year old heart was made happy by lovebirds and whose party was ruined. And for critics, there was a 19 year spread between Big Brother Taylor and Little Sister Cartwright, sort of long but not unheard of. My mother had the same spread between us four kids.