Fine Feathered Enemies?

Rating: 8/10 (15 December 2002)

It's hard to know what director Alfred Hitchcock, or authors Daphne du Maurier and Evan Hunter, were up to with The Birds. I've read a variety of explanations of the film and story, none of which quite makes sense. Not that a movie has to, but one would like to know what the director and author had on their minds when making it. The story itself concerns an unexplained series of attacks by birds on a small California coastal community. There is a romance, a subplot or two, but that's about it. A number of people get pecked to death, a gas station blows up, but the focal point of the movie, once it gets moving, is the birds themselves, and when or whether they will attack again. The acting by Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren, Suzanne Pleshette and Jessica Tandy, is good if hardly outstanding, though to be fair, they don't have that much to work with. By today's standards the special effects are fairly primitive, and one has to suspend disbelief now and again when some of the obviously unreal birds fly into view.
If it belongs to any genre, I would say that The Birds falls under the general rubric of what, for want of a better term, I would call the Anglo-Saxon Anxiety Film, which is to say a movie that features mostly WASP characters under attack from foreigners or outside forces in general, pulling together, often in some isolated outpost, where they make one last stand against the "invaders". The Anglo Anxiety film goes back to the earliest days of the movies, and includes many if not most westerns, especially those that feature white settlers and/or cavalry under attack from Indians. There are AAF elements in many horror movies, some gangster films (look what those awful foreigners are doing to our cities!), and World War II movies, especially those concerning the Japanese. A good deal of fifties sci-fi can be viewed in this light, especially The Thing and its various spaceman successors. By the sixties, the anxiety became more intense, and also more diffuse, often turning into black comedy (Dr. Strangelove, Rosemary's Baby). The Birds is Hitchcock's take on this Last Stand At the Alamo genre, and he makes the most of the improbable situation, even including an incongruously English woman ornithologist, who uncannily resembles Hitch in drag, to explain that birds are really are friends, and wish harm on no one. Could this be the director poking fun at Americans? We'll never know, of course, though it's worth pointing out that the great man remained a British subject, was knighted in his twilight years, and died in England.