The one indisputable Hitchcock masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (28 June 2002)

I have delayed commenting on a Hitchcock film for two reasons; first, so much has been written about them that I seriously wonder if there is anything more that can usefully be said and second, I am probably rare among movie buffs in not placing him at the top among the greatest of directors. That he is a marvellous entertainer and craftsman I would not deny; indeed there are few other directors whose work I can return to again and again with such pleasure, but his films are all, with two exceptions, surface divertissements and some pretty wondrous at that -"Vertigo" and Psycho" for instance. The ones I take really seriously are "The Wrong Man", an intense study, almost documentary in style, of the ghastly consequences of mistaken identity and "The Birds" which is so much more profound than anything else in the canon that I wonder if Hitchcock really was aware of the great gap between this and anything else he undertook. As I feel so passionately about this work it is probably the one to write about. Any serious discussion of "The Birds" cannot commence without clearing away the problem of its widely misinterpreted genre. Although I can appreciate that there are many with a bird phobia who can hardly bare to watch the film, I would insist that it is not a horror movie. While every attempt is made to explain the behaviour of Norman Bates in Psycho ( a genuine horror film), the malevolent attacks by the birds on human beings remain a mystery to the end, creating an ambivalence that is more the stuff of the metaphysical than the horrific. I see "The Birds as an allegory on the way human beings prey on each other, demanding possession and affection often when it cannot be reciprocated, with the birds themselves surfacing every so often as a sort of Greek Chorus to externalise the inner clawing and tearing apart that humans often do to each other. As the film has been analysed so many times I won't go into lengthy details, but simply record that it is the only Hitchcock film I would put in the top hundred of all time. It says something profound about the human condition and was made by a craftsman, who, post "Vertigo" and "Psycho", had reached the very apex of his career.