Wings of desire.

Rating: 8/10 (2 June 2009)

Certainly one of the stranger movies of his career, Alfred Hitchcock nevertheless is able to astound and amaze use even forty years after the release of this story of horrific occurrences in a small bay side town involving fine-feather friends.
What makes this a memorable experience despite its shortcomings, is how Hitchcock never explains to us the reason behind the birds. They attack but essentially there is no logical or natural reason to understand this. Perhaps it is supernatural, but that also is never examined. What Hitchcock wants to do is put ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances and study how they behave. He did this in Psycho, North by Northwest, and Vertigo which are three of his personal best as well as three of the best films ever made. Here, he uses elements from those films and creates a rather dizzying portrait of a small group of people trying to band together and fight against whatever nature brings them.
I'm not quite sure what Hitchcock is trying to say here. Perhaps he is saying that sometimes nature will impose its will on us and we shouldn't try and fight it. Or maybe he is suggesting we do fight back. However, I think that is besides the point as this is yet again a huge step forward for movies from the 1960s. Hitchcock insisted on using the ground-breaking technique from Disney to combine two different backgrounds and foregrounds to create shots that seem to be together but really weren't. Even today, this stands as some of the finest examples in special effects. Some elements of the story don't work as well as his other movies, but this is an enjoyable and strangely mesmerizing tale of scary things happening in a place you wouldn't expect by creatures you wouldn't expect. Next time, cover your head when you go outside.