I fell in love with Tippi Hedren!!!!!

Rating: 8/10 (28 September 2016)

Although I don't think that "The Birds" is Alfred Hitchcock's greatest film, it's very humorous, and obviously Hitchcock wanted to have a lot of fun with his audience. I like the way the film looks at the reaction of people to bizarre events, especially as some of the townspeople connect the arrival of the birds with the arrival of Tippi Hedren as though she somehow brought this on them. I didn't even notice that there wasn't a musical soundtrack the first time I saw the film, because the sounds of the birds attacking amidst the silence is really effective. "The Birds" features some great cinematography, a nerve-wracking soundtrack, and some finely wrought performances. "The Birds" is primarily famous for the sheer number of disconcerting and often stunning set ups it creates for the birds' attacks. And finally there's Tippi Hedren, the beautiful blonde discovered by Hitchcock after viewing her in a toothpaste commercial while Hitch was watching the Today Show. Hedren was one of the cool sophisticated blondes loved by Hitchcock (and this eventually led to problems on their next film, Marnie.) Tippi is just so classy and beautiful to look at and gives a very nice performance considering the fact that she had almost no acting experience. The film also led her to suffer a mini-nervous breakdown after having to endure days of having birds thrown at her during the film's climactic bird attack. Tippi is absolutely wonderful and was even better in a difficult role in her next (and last) Hitchcock film, Marnie. The film is also loaded with many interesting character actors in small roles: Charles McGraw, Richard Deacon, Lonny Chapman, Karl Swenson, etc. all giving entertaining performances.
But the sheer brilliance of these set pieces is off-set by the overall film itself. Stories and scripts of Hitchcock films are usually very tight and very precise, but where "The Birds" is concerned you could drive a Mac Truck through the gaps. It is much easier to 'suspend disbelief' re the bird attacks than it is to accept the way in which the characters behave throughout the film. This is not actually the fault of the cast, which ranges from serviceable to excellent, but rather of the way the film works (or more specifically, doesn't work) as a whole. Having made up her mind to play a prank on Mitch, how is it that Melanie can't come up with a better one? Why evacuate the children into open air instead of an interior room? Why search for the source of a sound, alone no less, when you know what the source must be? Hitchcock knows how to build suspense and he does it quite convincingly with this movie. He casually starts off with what seems to be an average affair of two people and then those characters have sub plots that surround them and things get a little more tense until their "normal" world is thrown off balance by some thing that comes out of left field. This is great suspense film with a witty dialogue.
Overall rating: 8 out of 10.