fun movie

Rating: 8/10 (1 November 2009)

It's possible that none of Hitchcock's movies have inspired so much passionate debate as this late-career entry in the animal horror genre. You have everything in the spectrum from those who believe that it's a subtle psycho-sexual allegory to those who believe that it's a ridiculously stupid movie about birds attacking people. I'd have to place myself somewhere in the middle of that debate, although at one point in time I'd have fallen more into the latter camp.
What I like about the movie is Hitchcock's wicked dark humor. The whole scene in the restaurant, beginning with this ludicrous conversation about birds attacking children and ending with the offended woman screaming "YOU'RE EVIL!" at the leading lady, is just incredibly funny to me. There's of course the guy in the corner who keeps saying, "It's the end of the world" at the worst possible moments. It's a fantastic scene that includes the film's most stirring action sequence (an exploding gas station, the heroine attacked in a phone booth) as a sort of main course in the midst of the black comedy.
The film does have problems in my opinion. The leading lady and leading man, Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor, might as well be made of cardboard for all their ability to emote. They have no chemistry and the Howard Hawks-ish way they are introduced is almost patronizing to the audience. Jessica Tandy is much stronger as the clinging mother. The sequences with Suzanne Pleschette and Hedren, indeed most of the scenes in the first half of the movie, are tedious. The effects were laughable the day they were released, because Hitchcock overuses rear projection and shows quite a bit too much of the bird attacks for them to remain plausible.
On the whole however, I'm more positive about this film than I was when I first watched it all the way through a decade ago. I think that the film works very well as a sort of dark comedy about how seriously we take ourselves. I like the fact that the cause of the bird attacks is never explained. It never descends into that sort of literalism that people like Steven King who were obviously inspired by this film tend to succumb to. But that really doesn't mean that the film is an allegory. I would prefer to think of the film as being on the level. I think all the stuff about the main character's mother complex and his budding romance with the Hedren character are basically given a lot of emphasis so that we can easily see how trivial it all is in the face of a massive bird attack. It's precisely the unexplained nature of the phenomenon that makes it so compelling. If you were to say that a giant radioactive cloud had infected these birds, the movie would lose all of its power. To me, the movie works on some level because there is such a strong disconnect between the "drama" going on with the characters and the horrific events with the birds. To try to draw these distinct threads of the movie too close together through symbolism actually undermines the essential strength of the film in my opinion.
Maybe that was Hitchcock's goal, I really can't say. We want so hard to understand the cause of the bird attacks, to somehow make it match up or fit with the human drama, that we can create these connections ourselves. In doing so however, we're no more sophisticated nor any less laughable than the hysterical mother who accuses Tippi Hedren of being evil, who stretches so far to find the cause of the attacks herself.