The reward is not worth the endurance test

Rating: 6/10 (16 November 2015)

Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds would be a truly masterful exercise in slowburn tension if it had been about twenty-five minutes shorter. Even as a fan of slowburn horror, often relishing in the age-old ideas of buildup and surprise to accompany the shock and awe that horror brings audiences, I found myself exhausted and almost indifferent to the titular subjects of the film and whether or not they were ever going to show up or not. For about fifty-three minutes, we are given an uncompromising amount of development and methodical plotting centered around a series of bland and wealthy archetypes to finally get to the point where the birds invade that the entire film almost becomes a study to see how long the audience will sit still to see what they came to see.
The film revolves around a young, pretty socialite named Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), who meets a lawyer named Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) in her bird-shop in San Francisco one day. He buys a pair of lovebirds for his sister's birthday, but because the shop is fresh out of stock, Melanie will have to deliver them the next day. Upon arriving at his mother's home the next day, Mitch spots Melanie and invites her to dinner. While there, Melanie meets Mitch's mother Lydia (Jessica Tandy), his sister Cathy (Veronica Cartwright), and a school teacher named Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette). The five meet and dine inside a small beachhouse off of Bodega Bay when they see a plethora of birds, particularly seagulls, beginning to attack them and their home. When this unexpected, and certainly unexplainable, event occurs, the family decides to combat it the best they can by retaliating with whatever is in immediate reach.
The Birds has become a quintessential American horror film, largely because of the reactions its director's name inspires. Hitchcock had a wonderful way with his films that made them transcend horror films into elegant, decorated melodramas that frequently made you jump. His films always ooze class in the way they are filmed and colored, showcasing details and making every inch of the screen count, as a result. Hitchcock could almost sleepwalk and make a film like The Birds look as good as it does, though for me, nothing beats the true amount of meticulous detail in actors and events occurring at once than in Rear Window.
The issue is The Birds feels like a generic 1930s serial overstuffed to reach surpass a two-hour runtime. The amount of filler and fluff we have to sit through before getting to what we came for is unruly, especially considering most of it is staggeringly slow and numb conversation by actors that feel like even they, themselves, are bored and disinterested in the lines they're reciting. By the time they titular villains actually take the stage, the kind of conservative narrative practices Hitchcock employed are abandoned in favor of a great deal of shock and awe, having countless crows swarm the screen at once, never seeming to really pose any harm to the characters, as if they're on a whole other layer of film that has been placed over another layer that has the actors and the set decorations.
The peculiar and cheap-looking mise-en-scene and the dreary pacing are somewhat disguised by Melanie and Mitch's retaliation efforts towards the end of the film. This is the point when Hitchcock trades the traditionalist elegance of a melodrama and the slow conversation for something more exciting and energetic. The intensity of the film suddenly shifts when we realize that the main characters aren't even safe from the birds in doors, as the winged creatures can come through the fireplace and easily swarm the home. The final twenty-five minutes of The Birds is satisfying and suspenseful, precisely what this film should've been all along.
However, the price we have to pay - about an hour of dreary buildup and hit and miss effects - to gets about twenty to twenty-five minutes of great entertainment is almost not worth it. The classic status of The Birds, something few horror films really get to relish in when compared to other genres, is undeniable; the worthiness is questionable.
Starring: Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleshette, and Veronica Cartwright. Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock.