Not particularly impressed to be honest.

Rating: 4/10 (1 November 2010)

The Birds starts in a San Francisco pet store where rich socialite Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) is about to pick up a Mynah bird for her aunt when a lawyer named Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) decides to play a joke on her & assume she's a shop assistant. Taken back by Mitch's charm & sense of humour Melanie decides to track him down & calls in a favour to find out where he lives, it turns out that Mitch spends every weekend at a small coastal town called Bodega Bay & drives down there herself where she meets his mother Lydia (Jessica Tandy) & younger sister Cathy (Veronica Cartwright). Mitch & Melanie fall for each other but find Lydia opposed to the relationship, meanwhile the birds in Bodega Bay have been acting strangely. At first it was the odd isolated attack but it has grown into full scale destruction as huge flocks of birds attack anybody they come across...
Produced & directed by Alfred Hitchcock & loosely based on the short story by Daphne Du Maurier The Birds has an imposing reputation, the sort of reputation that gives it classic status, unfortunately I must admit that I didn't actually like The Birds that much for several reasons. The biggest reason why I didn't like The Birds is because it's so slow, during the first fifty odd minutes next to nothing happens & for me the silly romantic game of cat & mouse between Melanie & Mitch just wasn't enough to maintain my interest & when Lydia the mother got involved I was wondering if anything was going to happen at all. To it's credit The Birds does pick up for the second half but it's a little bit too late to save the film, while I understand about the deliberate way The Birds builds up with just the odd attack or the odd gathering of birds during the first hour or so but that still didn't make it any more enjoyable with it's dreary romantic subplot that dominates the first half. At almost two hours long it felt like an effort to reach the end which it shouldn't have. The script is rather ambiguous, no solid explanation is given to the bird attacks, no explanation is given as to why Bodega Bay is the center of the attacks & there's that nothing sort of ending which neither has the birds or humanity triumphant so in effect there's no cause or resolution & the whole film feels a bit empty. Undeniably influential & much loved I can actually see where they are coming from but The Birds just didn't do much for me, sorry.
Hitchcock was a master of his art, of that there is no doubt & even here in The Birds there are some terrific individual moments like the flock of black Crow's gathering on school playground climbing frames behind Melanie or an aerial shot of Bodega Bay after an explosion that starts off clear but soon dozens of Gull's have flapped into view & head straight for the town or the final attack on Melanie. The setting is nice & Bodega Bay has turned up in another couple of horror films The Fog (1980) & Puppetmaster (1989). The Birds hasn't dated too badly, sure some of the fashions & cars have but the special effects are quite good & the locations still probably look like this even now. There's a bit of blood & there's a dead body with it's eyes pecked out, but it's only seen briefly & the amount of character's that smoke in The Birds is very noticeable as they light up at every opportunity. Oddly there is no musical soundtrack to The Birds, one of the few films not to feature any incidental music.
With a supposed budget of about $2,500,000 The Birds has great production values & decent effects for it's time, filmed on location at Bodega Bay & back at Universal Studios in Los Angeles. The acting is pretty good, Tippi Hedren (who is the mother of actress Melanie Griffith) & Rod Taylot make a nice enough couple & play off each other with a sense of humour.
The Birds is a film that I just couldn't get into, while I appreciate it's strong points of which there are a few the negatives completely swamp them & turn what could have been a great film into a dreary & boring one with no sense of reason or resolution behind it. A made for television sequel The Birds II: Land's End (1994) was apparently crap enough for original director Rick Rosenthal to have his name removed from the credits & replaced with the standard Alan Smithee.