Scary, yet beautiful assault on human smugness about nature

Rating: 8/10 (15 June 2004)

-The Birds- is one of two great animal-attack films; the other is, of course, -Jaws-, a very different movie. -The Birds- and -Jaws- are the only truly good movies of a genre that easily degenerates into pure schlock, exploitative, low-budget fare with bad scripts and dreadful acting. The two masterpieces of terror by animal assault the human conceit that 'we' own the world. The third best is the merely 'good' -Them-, whose overgrown ants do their predation on a bigger scale -- our scale -- than their usual world.
We may hold the land; the birds own the skies, and they can be anywhere. Only because of their small size are they generally harmless, but if they ever ganged up on us we humans would be in big trouble.
DuMaurier and Hitchcock exploit such a primal fear by turning the tables on us, exploiting our primal fear of sudden, horrifying death from animals striking from above, recalling our monkey-like ancestors who had cause to dread the lethal strike of beak and talon of a hawk or eagle. The birds have gotten organized, and they have chosen to take back their world. Unlike the shark that one never sees striking from dark aquatic depths, we see the birds coming and we fail to believe that they can do anything to us.
Plausible? Not really. At least it's well done, and that is all that we can expect, with the superb cinematography that one would expect from the great Hitch. It's second-rate Hitchcock, but second-rate Hitchcock is better than first-rate work of almost anyone else. This is the only horror film from him in which nature provides such terror. Aside from the original -Jaws- (which I think owes more to -Psycho- than to -The Birds- ), and -Them- (with the overgrown ants that result from irradiation that destroys the controls upon their growth), this is the only animal-attack movie to have cinematic worth.