More A Series Of Set Pieces Than A Coherent Film; Fascinating Nonetheless

Rating: 8/10 (3 February 2008)

Time has a way of qualifying our initial assessment of films, and this is particularly true of films made by director Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980.) Throughout the 1930s and 1940s he was regarded as a solid craftsman but not an artist; in the 1950s many of his films, most notoriously VERTIGO, were received with lukewarm interest. In the 1960s, however, attitudes about his work began to change, and with that came a major re-evaluation of his films. Films that had been earlier dismissed were recognized as great classics; some films that had received tremendous recognition at the time of their release were now seen as somewhat over-praised.
To a certain extent this re-evaluation continues today, and at this point one film in particular proves extremely contentious to critics: THE BIRDS, which was considered both extremely innovative and a great shocker in 1963 but which is now teetering on the brink of critical dismissal. Just as it took some thirty years to fix VERTIGO's position in the Hitchcock lexicon, so may it take fifty to arrive at a final summation here.
According to film lore, Hitchcock was intrigued by a newspaper story about a "bird attack," and his interest in the story gradually evolved into THE BIRDS. (Although technically based on the 1952 novella by Dauphne du Maurier, the story and film bear little relation to each other.) The story developed by Hitchcock and Evan Hunter concerned slightly wild San Francisco socialite Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), who becomes infatuated with Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) and whimsically follows him to his home at Bodgea Bay as a prank. Not long after her arrival, however, she is attacked by a seagull, and although her injuries are slight she is quickly, albeit somewhat unwillingly, received by Mitch and his circle. One attack soon leads to another, and before very long Melanie, Mitch, and the entire community are under siege.
THE BIRDS is primarily famous for the sheer number of disconcerting and often stunning set ups it creates for the birds' attacks. Two of these are particularly famous. While Melanie sits on a bench outside the grade school, her attention is attracted by a flying bird--and she turns to find the playground's jungle gym covered with crows, assembling for an attack as the children leave the school. Later, when the birds attack the town itself, Melanie is trapped in a telephone booth, a helpless witness to the horrors around her even as the birds begin to batter the glass that protects her.
But the sheer brilliance of these set pieces is off-set by the overall film itself. Stories and scripts of Hitchcock films are usually very tight and very precise, but where THE BIRDS is concerned you could drive a Mac Truck through the gaps. It is much easier to 'suspend disbelief' re the bird attacks than it is to accept the way in which the characters behave throughout the film. This is not actually the fault of the cast, which ranges from serviceable to excellent, but rather of the way the film works (or more specifically, doesn't work) as a whole. Having made up her mind to play a prank on Mitch, how is it that Melanie can't come up with a better one? Why evacuate the children into open air instead of an interior room? Why search for the source of a sound, alone no less, when you know what the source must be? Hitchcock apologists tend to justify these and many other loose ends in the film by stating that THE BIRDS is intended to have an open-ended structure without resolution and that the random and often incomprehensible nature of the script is intended to reflect the random and incomprehensible nature of the bird attacks. A typical argument in favor of the film also notes that the film is driven by themes instead of plot points. Well-- maybe. But I'm an "art film" fan myself, and I can't see it.
In the final analysis, THE BIRDS is more akin to modern ultra-commercial action and adventure films than it is to an art-film, with the action and adventure distracting you from the holes in the thing--including the fact that the film is surprising slow. Even so, while THE BIRDS has major flaws, it is so crammed with iconographic moments and visuals that it is impossible to completely dismiss the film as a commercial wallow pure and simple. At its best, THE BIRDS has an incredibly high level of artistry, and those moments really do carry the film and impress themselves in your mind in a most remarkable way. I offer my own experience as an example. I first saw THE BIRDS on television when I was a teenager, and although I thought it was entertaining enough I wasn't particularly impressed. The next morning, however, I opened the living room curtains--startled a flock of birds perched on the outside window sill--and I was scared half to death. And that's cinematic power, nothing else.
The DVD presents the film in excellent form and includes several bonuses, most particularly Hitchcock's darkly humorous movie trailer and outlines of a deleted scene. Final comment: it's extremely uneven, but it is also extremely powerful. Recommended.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer