Can I bring the lovebirds, Mitch? They haven't harmed anyone.

Rating: 9/10 (13 August 2016)

I have always maintained that a horror movie's power is most noticeably dulled by muting the sound, and no film is more affected by this phenomenon than The Birds. In an age where cheap scares are a dime a dozen and magnified ludicrously by the soundtrack's crashes, booms and roars, The Birds becomes a marvel of personifying the growing discomfort of silence. True to his nature, he does not ever give so much as a still shot of a seagull's vicious claws - the birds are always dive bombing in and out of the frame, fluttering on the edges, or in an erratic, chaotic mess covering the entire screen. So what do the poor humans have to rely on, then? The almost mechanical screeches that signal impeding doom are key. First there is silence, so jarring that the camera sweeps across the room looking for solace and finds only distressed figures that are so traumatised they have already begun the inevitable, hunched over wait for the next wave. Oskar Sala's symphony creeps into the ears as it matches the growing darkness descending over the roof and room (not unlike another pivotal, frightening scene in the car from Psycho). Gashes appear on the wooden door and Mitch hurries to barricade the weakness, briefly muffling the screeches, before they are assaulted by another cacophony of shrieks from the right. The scene is as much aural as it is visual; the birds manage to snuff out even the last feeble lights, plunging the humans into an abyss, but it is the implied threat of the mass of sound overhead and all around that strikes fear into their hearts. It's a clever reversal - the film starts in a pet store, with caged birds that rattle and chirp from their cages, and by the end it is the humans who are the ones having the walls of their cage banged and rattled.
But first there is the setup, which to Hitchcock is just as important as the payoff. He creates what is basically a nuclear test site, so pristine and so idyllic that there must be something hiding behind the edges. The characters are pointed caricatures, and clash in the most obvious of ways. Melanie Daniels is the prissy, delicate daddy's girl, who walks with a model's poise and an immaculate sense of dress. Hitchcock discovered Tippi Hedren in a commercial and recreates it in the opening here, with her striding across the street in those long legs and heels and greeting an audacious wolf-whistle with a dazzling smile. It's such an obviously enclosed moment, ripped straight from the spotless, faux-reality of television, but that is the idea; she is the pretty blonde taken to the extreme so it is all the more shocking when she is ripped apart and defiled (one might also theorise that Hitchcock and Hedren's strained relations play into this treatment). Melanie is a socialite, which means that her primary occupation is attracting scorn from baser, plainer women for how she prances about, flaunting her beauty, promiscuity and coquettishness. She is a direct opposite for the more moderate competition. The dumpy, despondent schoolteacher Annie Hayworth, who has an acute self-awareness of her character and knows that she has no chance with Mitch. And Lydia, the domineering and possessive mother, who is everything that Melanie is not; the unadorned, conservative housewife, who has remained rooted in her traditional feminine place (her nest, you might say) while she was splashing around the world naked in fountains. Oh, it's a wicked, wicked portrait that Hitchcock paints, and so it is all the more savage when he tears it apart.
They are all fighting over Mitch, and why not? Rod Taylor plays the absolute paragon of manhood, a high-end lawyer with enough flexibility and sensibility to easily juggle his work and his family. The star pair meet cute in the bird-shop, trading barbed dialogue and sarcastic quips that thinly veil their instant attraction to each other. He also shows an inkling of mischief that makes him all the more intriguing, and because it is a movie, she is able to instantly track him down and turn up the next moment without any fuss. How romantic. And then slowly but surely, signs of the birds and their violent intent begin to reveal themselves. After the initial seagull bombardment Hitchcock has a brief interlude where we think we might be let off. There are the usual archetypes; the kooky, disheveled cryptic that interrupts periodically with warnings of the impeding doomsday, and the venerable British expert who waves off any concern with a bit of common sense. So pandemonium, and then silence, and the uncomfortable lull that accompanies it. Only after Melanie's beauty is scarred and tainted can the birds cease their attack. Only then, when her threat is extinguished and her blonde curls tightly wrapped and soiled by the smear of blood, can she lay under the wing (heh) of Lydia's motherly nurture. But the birds are not so quick to forget. In that stunning final shot of the car in its agonising crawl towards San Francisco, they cover every spare inch of the frame, an oppressive wall of dread as dark as the night itself. As Mitch starts the car the screeches begin to build again, as if they are daring him to make a wrong move.