One flew into the cuckoo's nest

Rating: Null/10 (2 April 2016)

Alfred Hitchcock's "Birds" opens in a San Francisco pet store. Here we're introduced to Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) and Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor), she a young socialite, he a handsome lawyer. The duo flirt, trade witty banter and then go their separate ways. But Melanie, obviously smitten, wants more of Mitch. She purchases a pair of love birds and journeys to Mitch's home in Bodega Bay.
Melanie is typical of Hitchcock's female leads. She's svelte, statuesque, always perfectly poised and always perfectly dressed. But though he outwardly fetishized women, Hitchcock also loved to delve into their inner worlds. His film's title hints at this preoccupation; "birds" has long been a British slang term for "girls" or "women", perhaps owing to confusion with the Middle English word "burde", which also meant "young woman".
Regardless, "Birds'" first act watches as the perfectly coiffed Melanie slips into her perfectly polished Aston Martin and drives to the positively picaresque town of Bodega Bay (an obvious influence upon Steven Spielberg's Amity Island). Along the way Hitchcock treats us to immaculate compositions, masterful camera work, and a careful blend of comedy, sexiness, wit and foreboding. Most impressive, though, are the film's lethargic qualities. Much of "Birds'" first act simply watches as Melanie drives across Californian coastlines or wordlessly wanders about Bodega Bay. The film's unhurriedness, and Hitchcock's willingness to slow every set piece right down, points to a type of gracefulness and directorial confidence increasingly rare in cinema.
At Bodega Bay, Melanie becomes increasingly infatuated with Mitch. This infatuation ruffles the feathers of almost ever other woman in Bodega Bay, all of whom seem to nurse secret desires to be with Mitch. These women include Lydia (Mitch's widowed mother) and Annie (Mitch's ex girlfriend). Both are threatened by, and jealous of, Melanie's intrusion into their nest. If they can't have Mitch, nobody can.
And so the birds arrive. Expressing the unconscious desires of Bodega's women, and Mitch's mother in particular, these birds descend upon Bodega Bay. They sit upon rooftops, fences and occasionally dive-bomb Melanie. They're testing the waters. Sizing up the situation. Doing pre-invasion recon.
Lydia and Annie do the same. Across several beautifully staged sequences, the duo ask probing questions and do their best to disguise their true intentions, thoughts and feelings. But Melanie sees through such reconnaissance. She senses veiled threats hidden beneath urbane posturing, especially when around Lydia. Significantly, a large portrait of Mitch's father occupies the heart of Mitch's family home. With Daddy gone, Mommy has become the guardian of all Desire. Mitch - a broad-shouldered, caricature of 1950s masculinity - is thus locked in an Oedipal drama without even knowing it. Hoping to claim all Satisfaction for herself, Mommy refuses to let her Perfect Little Son go.
And so the attacks begin. Thousands of birds flock into Mitch's home and proceed to throw a hissy fit. Better sequences occur later, when a local man's eyes are gouged out and when a mass of birds slowly descend upon a schoolyard climbing frame. Hitchcock films these sequences with a mixture of gentlemanly, up-market sophistication, and tawdry, low-brow sensationalism. Release this film today and it would feature giant ostriches with machine guns. Hitchcock, though, draws from a more refined toolbox; voyeuristic long-shots, curious camera crawls and slow boiling suspense. His film also contains no music, only Bernard Herrmann's orchestration of electronically enhanced bird sounds.
Midway in "Birds", our heroes seek shelter in a local diner. Here various characters pontificate as to the motivations of the birds. Is this the end of the world? The apocalypse? Have the birds gone mad? The sequence ends with a hallway full of local women staring at Melanie like a coven of witches. "She brought them here!" they yell.
In Sam Peckinpah's "Straw Dogs", an "effeminate" man barricades himself in a house and attempts to hold off a home invasion. For better or for worse, the film reflected the anxieties of the 1960s, in which "sexually emancipated" women and "intellectual males" tried to navigate and shake off various gender stereotypes. "Birds'" climax presents a kind of sexual inversion of "Straw Dogs'". It finds our heroes locked in a house whilst thousands of birds attempt to force their way in. Here Lydia becomes emblematic of "traditional" womanhood; a maternal, asexual, docile homemaker. Melanie's the modern interloper; a high flying, independent, big city sexpot who "hates her own mother" and "dances topless in fountains". The film then ends with Melanie being beaten, humiliated and tamed. She's reduced to a childlike state, now no longer threatening and now in explicit need of Lydia's motherly nurturing. Only then does Lydia finally accept Melanie. Only then do the birds withdraw.
Controlling mothers are everywhere in Hitchcock's filmography. They feature most prominently, though, in Hitchcock's "Mommy Trilogy", which consists of three successive, very Freudian films: "Psycho" (1960), "Birds" (1963) and "Marnie" (1964). In "Psycho", a son jealously kills the controlling, puritanical mother who conditioned him to feel guilty about his own sexual desires. In "Marnie", meanwhile, the daughter of a once promiscuous now puritanical mother learns to stop fearing both men and sexual desire. In these two films, traumatic childhood memories, as well as "represssive" attitudes toward sex, lead to neuroses and psychoses in the grown up son or daughter. And in both films, when something induces the momentary retrieval of a repressed memory, a neurotic or psychotic episode is triggered.
Melanie's trajectory in "Birds" presents an inversion of her trajectory in "Marnie" (also starring Tippi Hedren). She's a modern, confident, "sexually liberated" woman who is beaten into submission and essentially turned into Psycho's Norman Bates. The result is a supremely strange film: a FX heavy, crowd-pleasing, expressionistic, psychodrama-slasher-sex-comedy, directed like High Art and featuring killer birds.
8.9/10 – See "Black Narcissus", "The Beguiled" and "Three Women".