Complex, brooding & savage movie, set in sunny rural idyll

Rating: Null/10 (19 August 1999)

Images of birds stay with you, long after the film has finished. Whether sat, menacing, on the school climbing frame, or flying in screeching monochrome against a pallid sky, those birds make a profound impact. What do they mean?
One cannot help thinking of things 'coming home to roost'. Tippi Hedren (playing Melanie), an ex-wild child who enjoyed the dolce vita in Rome- however true the 'naked in fountain' allegations- confesses to trying to 'find herself' via charity work and studying linguistics! In her first film appearance (Hitchcock discovered her in a diet drink commercial) Tippi produces a wonderfully perplexing performance of tight suppression; her hairstyle alone, so smooth and well-polished, indicates neurotically tight personal packaging: when it starts to come unravelled, so does she!
Robert Boyle- the film's designer- claims that the design of the film was inspired by Munch's painting, 'The Scream'. In a direct and visual sense it is hard to see that. But, in terms of this being a film that is about personal anguish and dislocation, there are definite parallels. All is not well in sunny Bodega Bay! Mitch (played woodenly by Rod Taylor) has a dead father, a mother who never got over that bereavement, and an 'ex' who washed up as the local schoolteacher. Via an off-shot TV set we hear about meaningless violence in the outside world.
The scene in the local cafe is pivotal: when, thanks to the birds, the stone of this little community is turned over, all manner of small crawling things emerge. In the cockpit that the diner becomes people turn on each other and (metaphorically) spit as the anxiety gnaws at them. The film is worth watching for that sequence alone.
Hitchcock shows his usual and effortless mastery of the visual. There is the early humorous touch where two lovebirds in Tippi's car sway from side to side as she drives round the curves of the coast road. There is the heavily symbolic 'pieta' scene at the end where Tippi (who has no idea where her mother is, who is dead to the world after being savaged by the birds) is cradled in the lap of Jessica Tandy- playing Mitch's mother, Lydia- who is finally enabled by this new crisis to start to get over her old one (the loss of her husband): the tableau is enormously moving.
It is worth reflecting whether what makes little sense as a straight account of external events doesn't add up a great deal better as an indicative account of internal events. In the cafe scene Tippi is accused of bringing the birds with her and- in this sense- that would be true: her unresolved and pitiless internal landscape is writ large in the skies above Bodega Bay, where she has to fight, suffer, and ultimately be redeemed. Meanwhile the schoolteacher- holding a torch in self-imposed exile- is finally snuffed out.
Oh, and there is the strange case of the dog that did not bark: this is a Hitchcock film unique in that it has no music! How does that affect what it conveys?
Another wonderful feature of the narrative is the ironic inversion between birds and humans it tells of. The petshop where the action opens is full of caged birds. One escapes and briefly flutters round before being ignominiously caught under Rod Taylor's hat and bundled back in the cage. At the height of the action it is people who are caged up in their houses by the birds- to the extent where they are nailing themselves in! Yet, finally, the birds allow the carload of people to leave showing, in this respect, more liberality than their erstwhile captors. One is reminded of what Tippi says in the petshop (to Rod Taylor) "now you know how it feels to be on the other end of a gag"