movie-review-style (details, but not too much)

Rating: Null/10 (25 March 2001)

Like many other animal-attack movies (Jaws, etc.), you would think that the solution is to stay away from the animal and it will not harm you, right? What do you do if the adversaries can get to you inside your own home? Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of The Birds by Daphne Du Maurier is a thrilling movie that asks the same question. Hitchcock has been known to produce suspenseful thrillers that send you home thinking, but The Birds can actually draw you into the town of Bodega Bay. The plot starts out with a young woman, Melanie Daniels, traveling to the little town near San Francisco to see a man named Mitch Brenner. The town's eyes were upon her, watching her every move, as she traveled out to Mitch's house. Mitch lived with his jealous overbearing mother, Lydia Brenner, and younger sister Cathy. Mitch and Cathy love Melanie, but Lydia is very suspicious of her. The unspoken tension that comes from Mitch's ex-girlfriend Annie Hayworth (Cathy's schoolteacher) is a technique that is somewhat difficult to find in the character development of modern-day characters. Once the birds begin to attack, Melanie's character development becomes the center of attention. She goes from a wealthy, boasting, girl to a well controlled, lovable woman by the end of the picture. Mitch Brenner, on the other hand, is a more prominent figure in Bodega Bay. His complacent demeanor settles the movie's enigmatic attacks. Alfred Hitchcock continues the element of suspense from the beginning of The Birds all the way to your living room. The fact that there is no music in the movie adds to the eeriness of the birds when they mass and attack, juxtaposed with the melody of children in song. Hitchcock also delayed the first major attack until near sixty minutes into the movie, a technique modern filmmakers use recurrently. There could possibly be a symbolic relationship between the birds and Lydia's jealousy of her son's women; once Lydia learns to accept Melanie, the birds can be looked upon with a different perspective. The scenes of the bird attacks may seem tacky today, but when the film was released, the birds in the movie were the newest special effect the public had seen for a while. He believed that the characters' reactions to the attacks were worth much more than the attacks themselves. Because of his passion for atypical, Hitchcock left out a reason for the attacks-the avoidance of that explanation was purely startling to audiences. Some may be disappointed by the slow progression of discovery that is hindered by the ending of the movie, but this is one that is left open to the imagination. To watch this amazing, thirty-eight-year-young Hitchcock classic come to life, rent The Birds today.