Is The Birds Hitchcock’s most overhyped and underwhelming fi

Rear projection effects are some of the worst things about old movies. It looks so bad and distracting.

Some people complain about CGI but rear projection effects are worse. I'll take well rendered CGI any day over them.

It was terrible. He made it as a chick flick disguised as action. It's very dull. Not a guy film by any stretch, especially since the hot babe is killed and the guy has to settle for the plain girl.

1/10

It's a very good film, but not among Hitchcock's best in my opinion.

To Catch a Thief is one that definitely leaves me underwhelmed.

I'd say so, yeah. It's a tall order to make birds scary, and he doesn't quite pull it off. Nevermind the dated effects.

Also, this happens:



The trailer is a work of art, though.

I was just looking at different takes on the meanings in the movie and it seems that many people get different things from the movie and people who see it as multiple metaphors at once. 

Even this comes up as one of the main ones on Google - The Birds is a political allegory about the psychological violence of capitalism and the fear-mongering of the Cold War. Fear of nuclear attack is apparent when the birds “cover the bay like a white cloud”, suggestive of a nuclear mushroom cloud.

That didn't occur to me at all while watching the movie.

I think the movie is using the birds to represent many things at once, including the obvious surface level one of nature fighting back. We see the pet shop of caged birds and then later the birds are attacking the city. At the very last scene the humans are surrounded by birds watching them. 

The Birds (1963), directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

First review

I was pretty young when I first saw The Birds and I remember the shocking realization -- both a sinking sensation and one of exultation -- that the mystery is not going to be solved! I'd been trying to puzzle it out: is it the love-birds? Are they some sort of avian royalty that the other birds are trying to rescue? (Tell me you aren't yelling "Don't take the love-birds!" in the final scene). Or is it as the hysterical woman in the diner says: Melanie Daniels is evil! Or is Mother Nature responding to the unstable mother-lover-daughter structures we find in Bodega Bay?

We are not to know. Some thrillers shock us by showing us shocking things; Hitchcock moves off our safe center by not giving us what we expect. My father used to complain about his TV shows: "They don't end, they just quit!" It's true; it doesn't end... My best example of another good film that doesn't solve the mystery is Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975).

This is Hitchcock's last great film. I keep it with the best of his post-1954 work: Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), and Psycho (1960). It's not that I don't enjoy To Catch a Thief (1955) and North by Northwest (1959), but those are Hitchcock-genre romantic-comedy-action pictures. The other four are unique, nothing like each other.

I can see how people might not like it as well as I do, even apart from the non-ending ending. It's slow-starting, although this gives us time to study the characters, each mysterious in their own way. This is Tippi Hedren's first film and she doesn't seem like a pro actress yet, although that cool demeanor concealing hidden depths is appropriate for the character. Rod Taylor is manly and stalwart, a good survivalist, but sometimes wooden and impenetrable, perhaps just a male figurehead surrounded by all that female energy?

We have a rich supporting cast, often more fun to watch than the leads. (Suzanne Pleshette Fan Club). And when the action begins (the phone booth, the upper bedroom) it is tremendously well done.

Misc notes:

• Melanie employs "reverse voyeurism" when she sneaks the love-birds into Mitch's house. It is erotic play without being seen. But Mitch brings out the binoculars: you know how men are.
• At one time I was sure that using the love-birds as a prank was the cause of the whole disaster.
• That long scene in the playground where Melanie smokes and the birds are assembling off screen: she doesn't turn around and we can't see. Do we want to or don't we?
• I've seen Charles McGraw in many films, but each time my first thought is: "Gruff-voiced fisherman in The Birds diner!" What happened to that character during the attack?
• I love, just love, the silent aerial shot of the burning gas station.
• The mother-daughter/rival-lover tension between Melanie and Lydia is very mysterious. It is not at all clear what either is thinking.
• Hitchcock's monster movie: he chose the eco-apocalypse genre. With a siege, just like a zombie apocalypse.
• Look at that beautifully eerie dawn shot in the second to the last pane below. It looks like an engraving for Bible art. The End Times? Or the Eden of the birds?
• Good Boedega Bay locations, although we have even more than the usual number of process shots.
• No musical score to speak of.
• This is Hitchcock's third film based on a Daphne Du Maurier story. Just coincidence: they didn't have a working relationship.
• Screenplay by Evan Hunter, well known for his Ed McBain "87th Precinct" series.

Available on Blu-ray.

Second review

I've given the film another viewing after enjoying Camille Paglia's slim book, The Birds, BFI Film Classics (1998).

Like a lot of academics she is able to find endless correspondences. Everything means something, symbolizes something else. A more common viewer might find films filled with happy accidents as well as designed structures.

She more than compensates for this lit-crit habit by showing a sincere enthusiasm for the film and all of Hitchcock's work. She gives a meticulous scene by scene analysis and really does come up with interesting observations that had not occurred to me.

Her favorite bit: after Melanie is first hit by the gull, Mitch tends her cut with a bottle of peroxide in the restaurant. Peroxide blonde, get it?

She likes all the actors and characters with the exception of young Cathy, who she finds too goody-goody. She defends first time actress Tippi Hedren, describing her performance as spot-on. She provides excerpts from interviews she did with Hedren.

She presents the restaurant episode later in the movie as a perfect little 14 minute three-act play:

• Dialogue in the lull between attacks: debate with the formidable ornithologist, the increasing panic of the mother and her children.
• Carnage on the street, exploding gas pumps, fire hoses, smashed phone booth.
• Discovery of the survivors huddled in the restaurant back room, a female jury to judge Melanie.

Paglia delivers one provoking thought almost as an aside. Everyone notes Hitchcock's style, but he doesn't begin with the intent to be stylish. He researched the street layout of Bodega Bay, the design of farm and school buildings there, what different types of women would have in their closets and handbags, how they carry their cigarettes (hard laquer case for Melanie, crushed paper pack for Annie Hayworth).

The director's "style" emerges from the hard work of creating a deep world supporting the movie, a "reality" he then manipulates and photographs. Other directors who want to immitate his "style" are always going to fall short because there is more to the film than its surface appearance.

Finally she points out something I had never noticed. Everyone presumes that is Tippi Hedren in the film poster, but it is actually adapted from a shot of Jessica Tandy as Lydia:



I've seen Paglia described as the "anti-feminist feminist" and she does seem to spend a lot of time criticizing feminism and academic ideologies. I think a kinder label would describe her as a "sex positive feminist" who loves the interplay of the passions in life and art.

I saw “The Birds” the first weekend it opened in 1963. I was a high school senior and a budding film critic and scholar. When we left the theater (The Majestic in downtown San Antonio, Texas), I told my buddies that this was one of the greatest movies ever. Reading reviews later at the library, I learned that most professionals didn’t agree with me; there were mostly mixed reviews. Critical consensus took a little bit of time to catch up to me, but finally did. I believe it has finally caught up to me.

It IS one of the Great Movies. And a lot of people agree with my assessment. My Lovely Wife and I had the opportunity to visit Bodega Bay a few years ago. We first stopped at the Visitor's Center. When I asked about "The Birds" sites, she handed me a two sided sheet from a large stack on the desk. I was prompted to ask how may "Birds" inquiries she got. She answered that one in every three was about "The Birds."

The Tides restaurant has changed very much since the film shoot (there was a fire at some point followed by a renovation) but if you go to their outdoor seating overlooking the bay, you can see the dock where Tippi Hedren rents an outboard motor boat from 1930s comedian, Doodles Weaver. It has hardly changed a bit.



The schoolhouse was an abandoned building in 1962. The film crew dressed it up a little bit and hung a sign on it. The house next door where Suzanne Pleshette lived was a façade and was taken down at the end of the location shooting. The entire site is now filled with mature trees. The “schoolhouse” is a private residence, but there is so much interest that the owners have put in a small parking lot for visitors’ convenience – but you park right in front of a sign asking for respect for privacy. This building is located in the nearby town of Bodega. In a bit of Movie Magic, when the school children flee down the hill, they arrive at the Tides which, in Reality, is seven miles away from where they started.


I regret that some of you do not appreciate this fine film but it has certainly stood the test of time in academia as well as in the minds of ordinary folk like me.