Unmissable Hitchcock Horror Classic Of Terrifying Bird Attacks In Coastal California

Rating: 8/10 (20 November 2007)

San Fransisco socialite Melanie Daniels meets lawyer Mitch Brenner in a pet store and there is an instant mutual attraction. She follows him to his family home in the small fishing village of Bodega Bay, but suddenly and inexplicably large flocks of birds start to attack the townspeople. Confused and frightened, Melanie, Mitch and his family board up the house and try to fend off this mysterious threat.
Everything about The Birds is genius; it's one of Hitchcock's greatest films, one of the very best scary movies ever made and has a unique position in horror cinema. If Night Of The Living Dead represents the birth of modern horror (and it does), then if there's one film it owes a debt to, it's The Birds; unexplained threat, realistic setting, nice people get killed, nervous breakdowns, impotent hero, besieged farmhouse, unresolved ending. As well as thematically, it also set many trends visually - measured tracking shots (Melanie delivering the lovebirds), clever use of sound and visual effects (the attack on the school), sudden shock moments (Lydia discovering the farmer's corpse) - watch any of the great horror films of the last forty years (The Exorcist, Halloween, The Evil Dead) and you will see these motifs refashioned countless times. At the age of 62, Hitchcock embraced new techniques and technology to make his one true horror film and turned in a masterpiece. What makes it so good for me is the mixture of the peerless style with the intriguing story and characterisation. People tend to remember the last half-hour of the film very well but forget that the entire first half is just all character development; we learn about Melanie's wayward past, Mitch and Annie's history together and Lydia's fears. The performances are all smooth and naturalistic, with Tandy and Pleshette both outstanding, and it's purely because we know and understand these people so well that the subsequent horrors have such an impact on us. The support players in the diner are fun too, notably Griffies as the gruff ornithologist and Lang as the panicking mother, and thirteen-year-old Cartwright - a future horror icon from Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and Alien - is wonderful as the terrified kid sister. The script by Evan Hunter (aka crime novelist Ed McBain), based on a great old story by Daphne DuMaurier, keeps reversing movie clichés - the characters aren't dumb but they panic, react wrongly, waste time and snipe at each other. Tandy is a textbook example of good acting enriching a horror film; watch the standard scene where the hero is reporting what happened to a cop and Hitchcock completely ignores them and chooses to follow Tandy around the room instead as she picks up broken crockery and tries (and fails) to restore normality to her life. The masterstroke is the revolutionary open ending (note that the traditional The End title does not appear) with our heroes driving off through an endless vista of watchful birds to an uncertain future. The horror never ends. On a visual level too, the film is quite wonderful. At this point, cameraman Robert Burks had made ten films with Hitch and editor George Tomasini seven, so they were in perfect accord. Burks' photography is outstanding both in technical terms since there are lots of complicated effects sequences (my favourite is the birds-down-the-chimney scene) and also the amazing faked location photography. Some of the film was shot in the real Bodega Bay on the Sonoma/Marin County border but most of it wasn't, yet it all appears to take place there. Take the scene where Melanie and Mitch drink wine on a bluff above the children's party; only the opening and closing shots are real - the rest is a studio but you have to really watch to pick these up. Even better though is Burks' eye for an unusual atmospheric shot - a profile of Pleshette reclining in a chair and smoking, the broken cups still hanging on their hooks, the horse-and-cart tearing down the panic-stricken street, the bird beaks picking away at the front door unseen, countless others. Combine this with Tomasini's brilliant editing (the birds amassing behind Melanie on the school's climbing-frame is just the best) and breathtaking matte/animation work by Ub Iwerks and Albert Whitlock and you have a film with an almost perfect technical pedigree. The final stroke of genius is the wild soundtrack, which features no music, only dialogue, effects and the ultra-creepy electronic screechings of the birds. Music does many things in films but one thing it does is provide a cathartic release - Hitch daringly took it all out (has any other mainstream film tried that since ?) leaving us with nothing to do but scream. If you're ever tempted to think that Alfred Hitchcock is overrated as a filmmaker, give yourself a slap and then watch this movie. It's that rare bird (sic); a hugely entertaining, amazingly original, brilliantly constructed, technically dazzling, atmospheric masterpiece.