A pleasant surprise that shows Hitchcock's versatility

Rating: 7/10 (18 September 2000)

A lot has been said about "The Birds" already, so I'll just throw in my quirky observations and be done with it. I had never seen it from start to finish, and having seen most of Hitchcock's other films, I was curious as to how it would stand up. I expected not to like it, but I wound up giving it a 7 in the voting booth.
I have to echo that the special effects were innovative for the time period. They weren't nearly as cheesy as I expected. The thing that annoys me about later Hitchcock films is his incessant use of backdrops. Hitch hated shooting on location, but after the 1950s the backdrop technique was badly outdated. He should have made the effort to do more location shooting. For example, in the scene in which Tippi Hedron is in the motorboat, we see a real live shot of her bringing it into shore and getting out of it. Why then, if she was actually there in the bay for that scene, did Hitch have to shoot the rest of the boat scene against a backdrop? Oh well.
I can't for the life of me see Hitch's attraction to Tippi Hedron. She's a mediocre actress at best, and I find her voice to be nasally and grating. I would have loved to see Ingrid Bergman in this role. Perhaps if she had been cast the writers would have re-written the story and actually made it interesting.
The second half of The Birds makes up for the boring, slow paced first half. I never thought of "Psycho" as a horror film- I saw it as more of a documentary, a psychological thriller. But "The Birds" was truly terrifying. As has been said before, the reasons for this are the lack of soundtrack, the use of "ordinary" creatures like birds as monsters, and the tension leading up to climactic moments. Nothing like "The Birds" had been done up to that time, and nothing has been done like it since. People were afraid of Martians before they saw "War of the Worlds", and they were afraid of sharks before they saw "Jaws." Not many people were afraid of seagulls before seeing "The Birds."
I thought the scene inside the cafe was hilarious. The doomsayer, the angry fisherman, and the elderly ornithologist had me cackling. I don't even know if this scene was meant to be funny, and not a single reviewer other than myself has mentioned it as being humorous. By contrast, I didn't laugh once when I saw "The Trouble With Harry", which was supposed to be a dark comedy. I think that what Hitch tried to do there, he got right here.

I loved the ending to "The Birds." I think its strength lies in its ambiguity. After such a surrealistic story, it was the only ending that was appropriate. "The Birds" is truly a unique film, both among Hitchcock's own body of work and cinema in general.