It's the end of the world

Rating: 8/10 (30 October 2015)

Melanie Daniels is a beautiful, spunky San Francisco socialite who meets handsome bachelor Mitch Brenner in a bird shop and pursues him to his home town of Bodega Bay, with the excuse of giving his little sister a pair of lovebirds for her birthday.
There, she meets the other women in Mitch's life; old flame, Annie Hayworth, his little sister Cathy and his emotionally fragile mother, Lydia who is immediately suspicious of her and her motivations.
The birds in Bodega Bay then start acting hostile, first towards Melanie then attacking the residents with increasing savagery until they are coming down chimneys and pecking their way through doors and windows, so not even staying indoors is safe.
The movie predates Jaws by over a decade but shares a similar 'nature hunts man' theme. Instead of coming up from the depths of the ocean, this threat swoops down from the skies, squawking and pecking.
No reason or motivation is given for the attacks, leaving the audience to draw their own conclusions, though some have speculated that Melanie is the catalyst as she is the symbolic 'cuckoo' that doesn't 'belong.' And it would certainly seem that the small town residents don't quite know what to make of her and her fancy clothes and makeup (my favourite reaction is the boatman's when she hands the love bird cage to him after she hires a small motor boat to cross the bay in order not to be seen driving up the road to Mitch's house), though various scenes in the movie point to there being attacks in other parts of the country which debunks this theory.
As this is a Hitchcock movie suspense and mystery is a given, though it is also one of his most graphic movies; where Psycho only implies penetration with a knife, The Birds blatantly shows the bloody sockets of a man with his eyes pecked out - quite a bold film-making choice at a time when graphic violence in movies wasn't 'the norm.'
Another unusual but effective creative choice was to not include a music score, giving the movie an eerily quiet feel.
While some say that The Birds doesn't have a 'proper' ending, as Hitchcock wanted to end the movie on an image of the Golden Gate Bridge covered in birds but it was too ambitious and expensive to accomplish at the time, his original vision is the ending I always picture in my head whenever I watch and would not be opposed to seeing this digitally realised in the future.
On a technical and intellectual level I know this isn't considered Hitchcock's best movie but it is a personal favourite of mine.