Hitchcock always knew how to make use of chaos, and he takes it to the extreme here

Rating: 10/10 (26 May 2005)

Probably no motif appears in Alfred Hitchcock's movies more often than chaos. While it played a central role in "Shadow of a Doubt", "Strangers on a Train" and "Psycho", "The Birds" is probably the ultimate chaos story, especially considering how Hitchcock plays with the audience.
It all begins when socialite Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) enters a San Francisco pet shop and meets lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor). While they at first seem to be a little displeased with each other, Melanie then buys some love birds to give Mitch. When she goes to his apartment and learns from a neighbor that he's in Bodega Bay for the weekend, she promptly drives up there. That's when things start to get strange. A seagull pecks Melanie on the forehead while she is on a boat, and then a bird crashes into a schoolteacher's door.
Finally, at a birthday party, a whole flock of birds attacks everyone. Then, a flock of birds gathers around a school and attacks the children as they're leaving. After a gas station explosion, it turns into full scale war; the chaos has irreversibly set in. Whereas in most movies, chaotic events get explained, they do not get explained in "The Birds", which adds to the terror.
What I mean by "playing with the audience" is this: for about the first half hour, the movie seems to be a romantic comedy. Then, once the birds attack at the birthday party, everything changes; there's nothing that's going to save anyone now.
A common theme in Hitchcock's movies is the guilty woman (think "Blackmail" and "Psycho"). Clearly, Melanie is a guilty woman, but guilty of what? Maybe this: she walks around in a fur coat, which identifies a disdain for animals. Perhaps the birds see her as the incarnation of everything bad that humans have done to animals, and so they take revenge on her.
Nowadays when something bad happens in a movie, the solution is to have Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger or Bruce Willis kick ass. Not so in "The Birds". Rod Taylor, whose character could easily be a "potent male adventurer", is helpless; seeing that the birds have essentially taken over Bodega Bay, Mitch boards up his house and hopes that the killer avians don't enter.
The movie makes an interesting use of the color green. First and foremost are Melanie's clothes: her dress and blouse are lime-colored. Also, as she is driving to Bodega Bay, she drives through vast fields, meaning a lot of grass. What does this mean? Maybe that although Melanie is disconnected from nature, the latter is creeping up on her.
I guess that an obvious point is that Tippi Hedren was one of Hitchcock's icy blondes, following Grace Kelly, Doris Day, Kim Novak, Eva Marie Saint and Janet Leigh. It's too bad that Tippi Hedren didn't do much after "The Birds"; she was hot in this movie.
So, in conclusion, the next time you see a bird, just remember this movie, and especially remember the song that the schoolchildren are singing right before an ornithological onslaught. It might save your life...