One of Hitchcock's Best

Rating: Null/10 (12 October 2003)

There are so many wonderful Hitchcock elements within this movie. The silent scenes in which tension is built and a story told with almost no dialogue or explanatory sounds, the slow building of suspense mixed with misdirection and bewildering amounts of detail in the story, the supporting town characters that are all too real in their attitudes and actions, the then state-of-the-art special effects of the birds themselves, and the excellent point-of-view camera work all add up to a great movie that does not rely just on the gore of the victims to keep the audience engaged.

The Birds is best watched and taken at its face value without trying to find symbolism or meaning in what is presented. I think that is what Hitchcock intended. The terror is that the birds are attacking for no apparent reason - and no reason is hypothesized in the movie. It simply is happening. The characters have to adapt to the situation and try to stay alive.
Tippi Hedren's character of Melanie Daniels is all too typical of a type of rich, sophisticated woman of the late fifties and early sixties who lived off of Daddy's money and had no real purpose for her own life. I knew women like her.
The problem with the movie comes from all of the main characters having too much emotional and historical baggage carried with them that for some unknown reason has to be exposed and discussed. These elements add nothing to the movie and drag down the pace of the story with long scenes of dialogue during which the characters talk about past romances, insecurities, family problems, etc. Hedren's, Tandy's, and Pleschette's characters all are plagued with so many emotional encumbrances that at times their characters just look silly or pathetic. Such neurotic-type problems may have been fairly common of movie characters of the sixties, or it may have been Hitchcock planting proverbial red herrings, but it gets annoying at times. The innuendo about sex in what had to have been an attempt to make the film look more `mature' now looks childish.
Ultimately, though, I still place The Birds up there with Psycho and think it remains one of the best suspense/thriller movies ever.