The Birds
It’s kind of striking to think that Alfred Hitchcock made his two most overtly scary movies back-to-back, late in his career. Was he feeling something at the time that made him want to dip into the more terrifying leg of suspense filmmaking? Regardless of the answer to that, “The Birds,” on the heels of “Psycho,” still feels like an anomaly in Hitch’s career- gone are many of the signature themes and ideas in his better films, but what remains is his genius in building set pieces and suspense through careful shot composition and editing. If the film still feels hollow, it’s because Hitchcock probably wasn’t looking to do more with it.
The film is based on a story by Daphne Du Maurier, but Evan Hunter’s screenplay deviates from her setting and narrative, leaving Hitchcock to tell his own story of a random, and unexplained, bird attack on a small town. The town in this film is Bodega Bay, just up the road from San Francisco, where Tippi Hedren’s Melanie Daniels goes to deliver a pair of lovebirds lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) was wanting to get for his younger sister, Cathy (Veronica Cartwright), for her birthday that weekend. Melanie drives up on her own to surprise the handsome Mitch with the birds- she is the socialite daughter of a newspaper man in San Fran- but she will find herself surprised, as well, when she’s greeted not just by his cold mother (played by Jessica Tandy) and a former fiancee (Suzanne Pleshette), but random bird attacks that get more dangerous as the film gets along.
While there is no explicit explanation given for the bird attacks, one is implied during a stretch of the film when Melanie is hiding out in a local restaurant after the first attack on the school children. You can feel the idea that the townspeople of Bodega Bay, whom have never experienced something like this before, blame this outsider for their current problem. Part of the reason “The Birds” doesn’t quite hold up as top-level Hitchcock is because the film doesn’t really land this idea, even when you combine it with the judgement Lydia Brenner, Tandy’s character, meets Melanie with. That’s more to do with the widowed Lydia’s concern that Melanie might take her son away from her- it’s also what caused Mitch’s relationship with Pleshette’s Annie to fizzle- but it provides the dominant tension in the film before the birds begin to swarm, and Hitchcock really comes to play as the Master of Suspense.
“The Birds” hits its high points in the second half of the film, as attacks begin to take over Bodega Bay. Starting with Cathy’s birthday party, the attacks get bigger, and I’m not going to lie, a bit more ridiculous. Because there doesn’t appear to be a reason for this, the suspense that Hitchcock is trying to build is diffused a bit for modern viewing, and, when you consider the post-war setting of Du Maurier’s original story, you feel like there were probably bigger ideas she had in mind than Hitchcock has here. For Hitch, it’s about the image of birds flocking and attacking a quiet town. That’s why something like the school attack works. We see Melanie waiting outside, and a crow lands on the playground behind her. And then another one. And another one. And then, Hitchcock lingers on Hedren for a while. When she next turns around, the playground is covered with birds, waiting. When they are waiting, it is when the suspense works best for Hitchcock, similar to at the end when the Brenners and Melanie are trying to leave their house, and birds are just sitting, waiting. The actual attacks are amazing to behold, as well, and payoff that building suspense, but that’s largely because of the terrifying sound effects that Hitch’s employs in having the birds attack more than some of the images, even though there are some iconic ones in this film still. While it doesn’t hold up to the highest levels of Hitchcock’s career, “The Birds” still finds the Master of Suspense doing new types of storytelling, even if they don’t contain the depth of his best films.
