Hitchcock is just sick, sick i tells ya!

Rating: Null/10 (26 February 2001)

As is the case with Psycho - the classic made directly before this film - The Birds is a story that can be split into two halves. Where Psycho gave us Janet Leigh's getaway before turning its attention to Norman Bates, The Birds gives us Tippi Hedren's practical jokes before letting the winged freaks terrorise us.
As is also the case with Psycho, the opening thread works well enough on its own, so that the gentle romantic comedy and Hedren's practical jokes feel like well-developed set-up rather than padding. Hedren is effortlessly charming, and her smoker's voice is cute and occasionally sexy (before it was passed down a generation to become irritating). The chemistry between her and Rod Taylor seems genuine enough, and the unspoken tension that comes from his ex-girlfriend and overbearing mother add depth to the characters. It seems strange that so many reviews complain of the wafer-thin story; these are details and depths that would be hard to find in the set-up of most modern movies.
Having Hedren's character as a practical joker is a nice touch, as most people know Hitchcock was a bit of a trickster himself. You get the idea he's sniggering to himself behind the camera, thinking `my jokes are a lot meaner than hers!' His sense of humour is perhaps more prominent than ever, and leads to my favourite shot in the whole film; as Hedren drives badly along winding roads, we see her love birds clinging on to their perch, leaning to one side and then to the other as she swerves all over the road. It looks incredibly fake but it's just such an inventive idea you laugh with it rather than at it, which I suppose was the point.
Once Hedren's flirting with Rod Taylor begins in earnest, and the story moves to Bodega Bay, the film begins to lose its similarities with Psycho. Whereas the shower scene in Bates Motel changed the tone of the film instantly, here we are witness to a rather slow build-up and an impending sense of doom. The tension is built with predictable expertise, so that things that shouldn't be scary genuinely are; when all you hear is a flapping of wings it's scary, when all you see is a bird landing on a climbing frame it's scary. The effects have aged quite badly, but they are no real barrier to the tension and fear you will feel, although you probably get more from the film if you're not too keen on birds already. While I haven't got a phobia I could live quite happily without their flapping wings and biting beaks so all the movie's tricks worked on me.
As other reviews have pointed out, the most noticeable difference with Psycho comes in what we are allowed to see. Shadows and chocolate sauce were enough to scare in Psycho, but in The Birds we see everything, including a horrible shot of a corpse whose eyes have been pecked out. It is testament to Hitchcock's skill that he could approach these movies so differently and have them both work so well, each scaring the audience in their own way.
The ending is deliberately abrupt, and I'm not quite sure if I liked it or not. It was a nice idea to suggest that this wasn't the end of the story, just the end for these characters, but as with most older movies the absence of an end credit sequence means there is no time within the film to think about it. It was probably a little too abrupt, but it is hard to see how else it could have ended.
My main recommendation for the film is that for a few days after seeing it, I noticed loads more birds than usual on the wires and rooftops outside my house, and felt rather suspicious of why there were there. I'm sure Hitchcock would have wanted it that way.