The Birds [1963]

Though remembered for contributions to the horror film, Alfred Hitchcock made surprisingly few, tentative stabs at the more fantastical side of the genre. The first half of Vertigo suggests ghostly goings-on but they turn out to be part of an earthly murder scam, and a bogus psychic has a flash of genuine divining ability only at the very end of Hitch's final picture, Family Plot. Psycho, a cornerstone of true horror whose influence is still inescapable, was one of a run of films the director made [The Lodger, Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train, Frenzy] about villains we would now label serial killers. But Norman Bates's mad mother returns from the dead only in his mind and the trappings of old dark house gothic are evoked almost in parody, as if to say that the traditional horror film of evil-doings in the shadowed fruit cellar has been outdone by the nastinesses that take place in antiseptic motel bathrooms. However, upon its release in 1960, Psycho was such a huge success that the Master of Suspense found himself hailed also as the Master of Shock, and in looking for a follow-up subject, he set out to pick something that would outdo even Psycho in the extravagance of its effects. That led him to his one outright fantasy, The Birds.

Daphne du Maurier, whose semi-gothic melodramas Jamaica Inn and Rebecca had been brought to the screen by Hitchcock twenty years earlier, had no qualms about mixing the ghostly with the mysterious, as in the story later famously filmed by Nicolas Roeg, "Don't Look Now". Her short story 'The Birds', which reads like a sketch for Night of the Living Dead, takes place in an isolated Cornish farm besieged by an unexplained, relentless attack on the part of a mixed-species flock of savage birds.

Demonstrating that celebrities ought to read the books they stick their names on, Hitch came across the story in one of the many paperback collections [ghost-edited by Robert Arthur] published to tie in with his TV fame as a ghoulishly witty host on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. If the rights had been bought by a British producer, perhaps The Birds would have become one of that cycle of home-grown rural science fiction thrillers - Village of the Damned, Invasion, Night of the Big Heat - that crept out in the 60s, with Jack Watson as the farmer and maybe room for Peter Cushing as the local GP. As it was, Hitch decided to take the title and the idea and little else from du Maurier, hiring novelist Evan Hunter [aka Ed McBain, of the 87th Precinct novels] to develop a new frame for the story.

Together, Hitchcock and Hunter opted to begin the film as a glossy screwball comedy about an irrepressible heiress and a stolid lawyer. The central couple have a mix of personal antipathy and sexual attraction that allows for a deal of sniping dialogue on the lines of recent Doris Day-Rock Hudson romantic comedies, though this reverting to the classic Grant-and-Hepburn mode whereby the man is stuffy and the woman frivolous rather than pitching to the cliché of the times by making the hero a sexual adventurer tamed by a stern virgin. Throughout the first half of The Birds, we follow madcap Melanie Daniels ['Tippi' Hedren] and macho Mitch Brenner [Rod Taylor], whose name is presumably Hunter's sly rhyme with Hitchcock's nickname, from 'meeting cute' encounter in a San Francisco pet shop up to the Brenner family home on California's picturesque Bodega Bay, where Melanie pursues Mitch to play a joke but stays on to go to a birthday party for his kid sister Cathy [young Veronica Cartwright]. The comedy has a strange, serious undertone as Melanie, who turns out to be less screwy and screwed-up than we at first think, discovers - through a conversation with Mitch's pragmatic ex-girlfriend, schoolteacher Annie Hayworth [Suzanne Pleshette] - that Mitch has a very strange, semi-Normanbatesian relationship with one of Hitch's familiar mad mums, Lydia Brenner [Jessica Tandy].

But, in every scene, birds are present: some innocent [the love-birds Melanie buys as a present for Mitch's kid sister] and some sinister [chickens that refuse their feed]. There's talk about flocks driven mad by the weather and the cute mating habits of pet birds, and Mitch makes a catty remark about Melanie living in 'a gilded cage'. Gradually, incidents pile up: while taking a boat across the bay, Melanie is beaked in the forehead by a diving gull; while Melanie and Annie chat about Mitch, another gull batters itself to death against the door. Only at the half-way point, during Cathy's birthday party, does the serious attack start, and the love story is shredded in favour of a sustained horror that tears apart all semblance of a 'normal' film plot. The party scene, which comes after a talk between Mitch and Melanie that resolves their conflict and seems to set us up for a clinch, is especially gruelling, with one persistent bird viciously pecking a little girl's head as her legs thrash. The next day, to confirm that this isn't an isolated incident, Lydia visits a neighbouring chicken farmer to check out that feed situation and, after a brilliantly Hitchcockian omen [a row of broken china cups hanging on a dresser], is shocked to find the dead man with his eyes pecked out, an astonishing bit of violence in 1963 presented in strawberry-jam colour as opposed to the monochrome of Psycho and emphasised by a series of cuts that zoom into the dead face like James Whale's first reveal of the Monster in Frankenstein.

For the rotund auteur, part of the interest in The Birds was the opportunity to create a new star in the mould of such previous 'Hitchcock heroines' as Grace Kelly and Kim Novak. He spotted Hedren in a TV commercial, in which she was wolf-whistled at exactly as she is in the film's first scene just before the director's obligatory cameo, and schooled her to be his leading lady, working not only on her acting but on a distinctive hairstyle [very Vertigo] and dressing her up in tailored Edith Head numbers. In 1963, some critics didn't respond to the frivolous Melanie of the first half of the film [they were even cattier about her second Hitchcock lead, in and as Marnie]. However, we can now see what the director was thinking of: we're not supposed to warm to Melanie, who comes across as rather a stern-jawed libertine, until after things get bad for her. We only sympathise with the woman when she is being repeatedly pecked and pestered by birds, or even [in a less-noticed horror highlight] blamed for the catastrophe by a hysterical woman huddling with other survivors in the Tides restaurant. Less attention was paid to the Australian Rod Taylor, who had been in The Time Machine and was notably lower-case after Cary Grant or James Stewart but expertly conveys the mix of manly confidence and real fear necessary for the situation. A big movie star in the role would have unbalanced the film, which depends for its effects on undercutting your expectations.

The Birds may be too slow for MTV-era sensibilities: modern audiences are supposed to demand a bird attack before the opening credits and one every five minutes until the big bird attack at the end [as demonstrated by the unwise 'Allan Smithee' TV movie follow up, The Birds II: Land's End]. However, after the farmer is found dead and the typically obtuse Sheriff refuses to believe the birds are responsible, the film rattles through its second hour in a sustained crescendo of suspense, punctuated by crashing notes of horror. Melanie waits outside Cathy's school, smoking a cigarette [movie heroines could light up back then], as the class sing an absurd folk song ['Risslety-Rosslety Now Now Now'], and crows settle one by one on the climbing frame behind her. It's such a powerful image that a lesser filmmaker might have used it to preface the first bird attack, but the point of being a master of suspense is that we [and Melanie] have to know what the creatures are capable of before we can be really scared. Melanie and Annie try to herd the children to safety, but the birds attack again - these days, it would be unthinkable to make kids the major victims in a sequence like this.

After that, the film takes a trip into town, to the Tides Restaurant, from which Melanie telephones her newspaper proprietor father with the news, and we see the crisis is not just limited to her immediate vicinity. Hitchcock felt that to give an explanation for the bird attacks would be to take the film too close to the type of science fiction associated in the 1950s with cheap B-pictures - maybe it's radiation from a returning Venus probe or mind-control by The Beast With a Million Eyes - but knew that it was only natural that the characters would wonder. The restaurant scene, with a drunk cheerily declaring that it's the end of the world and a tweedy eightysomething ornithologist [Ethel Griffies] pooh-poohing the whole thing by declaring that birds couldn't attack with malice because 'their brain-pans aren't big enough', raises enough possible objections to and explanations of the premise that we can get on with things as a dropped match lights spilled petrol and a line of fire burns through the centre of town, as seen in a stunning high-angle process shot that allows birds to flap lazily into view over the town they are destroying.

One or two studio exteriors [especially on water] are glaring fakes [Hitchcock hated working on location because it lessened his control over the image and the actors], though the special effects are, on the whole, extraordinary, with a great many shots you don't notice as optical effects until they're pointed out [even the farmer's empty eye sockets are an optical]. Ever the innovator, Hitch worked hard with world-class effects men [Ub Iwerks], bird-wranglers [Robert Burks, fresh from apt chores on The Birdman of Alcatraz], matte artists [Albert Whitlock] and sound effects men [Remi Gassmann, Oskar Sala] to make the attack sequences unforgettable. Hedren is usually centre-screen, her immaculate Edith Head look pecked and torn apart for sadistic thrills in a phone box, a parked car and, most nightmarishly, the upstairs room at the Brenner house. Like the later heroine of Night of the Living Dead, Melanie lapses convincingly into near-catatonia after this last experience - which Hedren described as five hateful days of the entire crew throwing birds at her - and even tries to fight off Mitch as he tries to bind her wounds. Another typical Hitchcock touch is that early in the film we see at great length the iodine-dabbing and wound-cleaning necessary to treat one tiny bird-peck, setting us up for the far bloodier, more extensive ravaging that dominates the second half.

The film's unprecedented refusal to explain forces you to come up with your own reasons for the attack, ranging from the revenge of persecuted nature, the twisted sex drives of a clutch of weird female characters [Mitch is the only significant man in the film, with peripheral figures like Sheriffs, bartenders and fisherfolk played as amiable oafs] or a sheer cosmic cruelty. And the finale, which infuriated audiences in 1963, has the survivors driving off through a landscape covered with currently-quiescent birds and no guarantee that the crisis was over or that the world hadn't come to an end. The script contained a more elaborate drive through the ruins of Bodega Bay but essentially ended at this point, though Hitch often said that he would have liked to take the story to San Francisco and reveal the Golden Gate Bridge covered with birds [something like the end of Zombie Flesh Eaters, in fact]. In the 1970s, in the wake of the Birds-influenced Night of the Living Dead, endings like this became almost obligatory in horror movies. Now, with scriptwriting courses jamming notions of 'closure' into filmmakers' heads, it seems radical and unsettling again. There isn't even an end title.

Like Psycho, The Birds benefited from a publicity campaign much like the media blitzes we now take for granted. Posters with a clever tag-line ['The Birds is coming!'] were up everywhere, Hitch sponsored a coast-to-coast pigeon race, the trailer is a misleading ornithology lecture delivered in his TV intro style by the director himself, and Hedren got the big glamour build-up. It was a hit, if not on the cost-to-profit scale of the inexpensive Psycho, and stands as Hitchcock's last full masterpiece. The things about it that feel 'wrong' may well be a side-effect of the way its director innovated rather than imitated, and the things that really work have been so often echoed or imitated that they have become part of the language of the genre.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Empire Special: Horror

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