The frightening vengeance from Nature

Rating: 8/10 (4 March 2007)

From the idea that common birds could attack people for no reason, the suspense master Hitchcock created a classic thriller. From ancient times, Men dominated birds, caged and embalmed them as trophies. What would happen if, suddenly, all the birds joined together and rebelled against us? The answer is given on the movie: we wouldn't have a chance of surviving. The movie is based on a story by Daphne Du Maurier. The difficulties of carrying out this task were enormous. The special effects were huge for that time, when there were no computers. Ubi Werk won a nomination to the Oscar for Best Visual Effects, but lost the prize to Cleopatra. Hitchcock used several kind of birds to simulate the attacks: real birds, trained birds, mechanical birds and even embalmed ones. In the beginning, The Birds is like a romantic movie, with the casual encounter of Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) and Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) in a pet store. But when Melanie travels to Bodega Bay to surprise him with two love-birds, the movie twist the mood. A seagull attacks Melanie and, suddenly, the birds start to attack people everywhere. The blood becomes visible, the destruction and the dead appear in all Bodega Bay area. Hitchcock appeals to successive and quick big plans to show the victims of this mysterious evil. The visual horror is combined with silence, only interrupted by the sound made by the birds. Robert Boyle, who was responsible for the scenarios, said that he was inspired by the painting The Scream by Edvard Munch, for the feeling of desolation and madness in a kind of inner solitude. One of the mythic scenes of the film is when, near the school, Tippi Hedren, dressed with the green tailleur she wore during the all film, is seated in a bench smoking a cigarette. We hear the children singing in school and, slowly, the crows begin to join behind her. A little later, there are hundreds of crows, quiet, waiting to attack. It's interesting that the director who always approached the theme of guilt, and how this guilt affected people, made a movie where the evil appears, in a pure state, and where the guilt isn't there.