“The Birds Is Coming!” screamed early ads for Alfred Hitchcock’s horror/thriller, simultaneously giving grammar nazis an utter conniption and alerting 60s cinema goers that something huge was on the wing. However, when Hitch’s groundbreaking eco-horror came in for a landing, it got a bit of stick from the director’s usual fan base, pointing out the odd spot of wooden acting and some pacing issues; but the fact is that even more so than Spielberg’s Jaws, Hitchcock (as usual) was way ahead of his time when it came to the knack of elevating a B-list plot with A-list care.
A movie about our fluttering, feathered friends suddenly turning on us and descending upon our upturned faces with eye plucking beaks could have easily being a laughably camp exercise of screaming extras ludicrously wrestling with stuffed birds. And yet in Hitch’s hands, The Birds combines the director’s usual flair for misdirection with some of the most accomplished set pieces of the auteur’s glittering career.
After a chance meeting in a San Francisco pet store, entitled socialite Melanie Daniels and lawyer Mitch Brenner embark on strange bout of flirting that soon gets a little bit out of control. While Mitch has recognized her from a court appearance a short while back, he pretends to think that Melanie is a pet shop employee, while she, prone to practical jokes at the drop of a hat, plays along. However, once the game is up, cross, yet still flirty, words are exchanged and Mitch leaves for his family’s farm located in Bodega Bay for the weekend; however, that hunger for tacking a practical joke too far has Melanie buying the love birds that Mitch was looking for for his sister’s birthday and then stalking the lawyer all the way back to the bay to sneak into his house and leave the birds there along with a scathing note.
As unorthodox as this behavior may seem, it goes off without a hitch – aside from a random dive bomb from a passing seagull that cuts her scalp – and it even get Mitch and her conversing beyond snappy retorts and before you know it, she’s meeting the family and renting a room with Annie, a longtime ex of Mitch’s. However, while the glamorous city stylings of Melanie are a big hit with Mitch’s little sister, Cathy, clingy matriarch, Lydia, isn’t so sure about this woman who has suddenly just waltzed from San Francisco.
However, while this chance meeting hurtles toward becoming a full blown romance is starting to get everyone to open up pent-up feelings and emotions, the sky almost literally falls when flocks of birds suddenly start attacking humans in vicious, pecking, waves. After a couple if preliminary assaults involving seagull’s crashing Cathy’s birthday party and a flow of sparrows erupting from a fireplace, Cathy’s school gets attacked by a murder of crows out for actual murder. From here, things get worse as paranoia and confusion reign, and it becomes plain that the attacks are only getting bigger and bigger, our leads realise it might be time leave Bodega Bay and fly the coop.
Hitchcock may have been a lover of cruel practical jokes and something of a prick to women, but the rotund man of suspense certainly knew how to fuck up an audience. Be it the gargantuan narrative u-turn of Vertigo, to the shifting of our alliengences in Psycho, surely misdirection was the greatest asset in Hitch’s bag of tricks and the man certainly didn’t mind confounding an audience to the point of utter distraction simply to amuse himself. This has led to some reviewers who in the past have suggested that, with The Birds, Hitch took a joke too far and those coming to the film for the first time may wonder why this killer animal movie moves slower than a dead pigeon. The answer is simple; Hitch isn’t making a killer animal movie – at least not at first – and instead channels all of his energy into crafting a drama/romance that’s so incredibly detailed, you’ll wonder if the great director forgot to include the any enraged tweeters at all.
For an hour he builds up this relationship of two people from scratch as Rod Taylor’s Mitch and Tippi Hedren’s Melanie circle each other in the great coliseum known as love as the get progressively hornier and hornier. In fact, Hitch goes so deep with them, he not only starts peeling back the psychological layers of his slightly brattish and headstrong female lead (absent mother syndrome), but he even gets into the brain box of Jessica Tandy’s Lydia, who, after the death of her husband, is terrified of her son meeting a woman and leaving her. However, Hitchcock is as Hitchcock does and just when this group seems to be bonding in a way that could be beneficial to them all, the director literally flips the bird at the very burgeoning romance he’s spent half the movie setting up.
From here, The Birds lives up to the hype as Hitch keen, directorial mind cooks up technically complex set pieces with more moving parts than a sparrow’s skeleton as he rewrites the book on how to stage such a thing. The foreshadowing is agonisingly good, with the legendary image of crows slowly gathering on a climbing behind an oblivious Hedren easily ranking as one of the greatest “oh shit” moments of horror/thriller cinema.
But then, somehow, it gets even better – and by better, I mean more terrifying, of course. The vicious attack on a group of children (who all look genuinely traumatised) by a gang of avian assholes is legitimately upsetting and is the clear inspiration for later, nature amok movies such as Jaws, Piranha, Alligator, Grizzly and Tentacles having absolutely no compunction against gleefully fucking up kids at the drop of a wing. But then the attacks get bigger and the major assault on the town may actually be my favorite moment from all of 60s cinema as Hitch finally let’s these flying fuckers of the chain. The aerial, God’s-eye view of the bay after the gas station blows, that sees amassing birds slowly gliding into shot, may be a product of dated special effects, but it doesn’t make it any less breathtaking. And the attack itself is unrestrained in its spitefulness – watch Hedren’s frozen expressions as we snap back and forth as spilt gasoline ignites; feel the panic as gulls repeatedly smash themselves into the glass of a phone booth. If the occasion matte line or obviously stuffed bird slips through the cracks, it doesn’t matter as the furious editing (rival to even the shower scene in Psycho) pecks you into oblivion.
Some have criticised Hitch’s methods – legendarily having birds thrown at Hedren (who nearly lost an eye) for five days straight, is almost Kubrickian in its sadism – and others have been concerned about his apparent motives – “punishing” his latest icy blonde for being capricious with an avian apocalypse is harsh, even for a Hitchcock gig – but the thing about The Birds is that, like Jaws, you can put virtually any metaphor you want onto it and it’ll pretty much fly.
Confounding, jarring and utterly terrifying, the debate about The Birds’ merit will likely never end; but with expertly delivered trauma and a truly stunning ending that almost manages to out-ambiguous John Carpenter’s, this is one film that’s never failed to get me into a flap.
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We Have Issues 
Horror films where the monstrous force, whether it’s Jaws, the Alien, the Thing or even the Birds, can serve a metaphorically relevant purpose may be all the more practical in retrospect. Given all the delicate issues that make us as a human species nowadays feel so near to our breaking points, The Birds is certainly as chilling as it needs to be in that regard. We like to think that we can have control over things in trying times and most especially over ourselves. So any film like The Birds that dares to imply how wrong we might be can earn its most significant reflections. Thank you for your review.
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