Hitchcock Collection: The Birds

If The Birds isn’t Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest film then it’s certainly one of his most technically accomplished. It’s also one of his most typical in its irresistible mixture of nail-gnawing suspense and dark wit, mingled with the kind of psychological and intellectual undertones which many directors strain to introduce but which came to Hitchcock naturally as part and parcel of his work. Although one might complain a little about some underdevelopment of the characters or the somewhat jarring shift in tone, it’s such a beautifully sculpted piece of filmmaking that such whines seem somehow ungrateful. This is Hitchcock the entertainer at his most wittily assured and I can’t think of a better film with which to end my fourteen-part celebration of his work.

Although nominally based on Daphne Du Maurier’s short story of the same title, published in 1952, The Birds retains little except the title and the central idea of birds suddenly attacking mankind for reasons which are never explained. To be fair to Dame Daphne, the film also shares the mounting sense of terror as the attacks intensify. However, in most respects it very much stands as an independent piece of work. Hitchcock’s film stars ‘Tippi’ Hedren as Melanie Daniels, a society beauty who meets Mitch Brenner (Taylor) while buying a mynah bird and decides to deliver a pair of lovebirds to his house in Bodega Bay, California. As she travels to the house, she is suddenly attacked by a seagull. Writing it off as an accident, she insinuates herself into the life of Mitch and his family and friends – including his frosty mother (Tandy) and long-time on/off flame Annie Hayworth (Pleshette), a local schoolteacher. The tensions between Mitch, his mother and Annie begin to become increasingly strong but their fragile equilibrium is disrupted when more bird attacks take place and the whole of Bodega Bay comes under siege.

I can’t think of many other films which ratchet up the suspense with quite the relaxed élan of The Birds. After the opening credits – terrifying in themselves, a chorus of triumphant squawking and fluttering motion – Hitchcock wastes no time in introducing the two central characters and the constant presence – whether friendly or menacing – of our feathered friends. Mitch and Melanie meet in Davidson’s Pet Store amidst a host of birds and their first conversation – innuendo riddled, as is much of their chat – is about a pair of lovebirds which Mitch wants to buy for his sister’s eleventh birthday. Hedren and Rod Taylor’s somewhat stolid delivery of Evan Hunter’s delicately witty dialogue doesn’t matter because Hitchcock keeps the scene on its toes and paces it to perfection. But shortly before this meeting-cute we have a foreshadowing of what is to come as Melanie looks up and finds the San Francisco sky full of weirdly hyperactive birds. Hitchcock grabs us straightaway with both the potential horror and the attractive romantic comedy and he never lets go. The film takes a while to get to the big set-pieces for which it has become famous but Hitch doesn’t lose us for a moment. His sense of structure is unerring and in Evan Hunter (better known as the brilliant writer Ed McBain) he finds a collaborator as congenial and talented as John Michael Hayes or Ben Hecht. This opening section also seems intended to be a showcase for Tippi Hedren, making her screen debut. A well known model, she was signed to a contract by Hitchcock – similar to the abortive one he made with the irritatingly pregnant Vera Miles – that gave him exclusive rights to her screen image, a clause which he was to turn into some kind of psychological stranglehold during the filming of Marnie. For the moment, however, Hedren seems to have found it a dream come true. She was making movies with an internationally renowned director and possessed a wardrobe full of exclusive clothes designed by the legendary Edith Head.

Hitchcock takes his time and that’s something on which he prided himself. If you watch Psycho or Strangers on a Train, there are long periods where, superficially, not much is happening. But when you get pulled in to the story and the characters, even a superficially irrelevant scene can be packed with ominous hints and suggestions. The Birds is paced very slyly with a marvellously suggestive use of landscape and sound. The sheer isolation of Bodega Bay – all blue sky and space – becomes weirdly oppressive (and being trapped in the wide blue open is something which Hitch used to devastating effect in North By Northwest) – and gradually, every single squawk or rustle becomes filled with terrible significance. I stress this because it’s high time that the current cinema got back to the fine art of suspense; waiting for something to happen should be just as exhilarating as watching when it finally does. As Hitchcock might have said – tell ‘em, tell ‘em again and make ‘em wait.

The Birds marks one of the high watermarks in Hitchcock’s experimentation with pure cinema. Quite apart from the visual storytelling, which is beyond criticism (as it should be given the in-depth storyboarding), we have the technical achievement of the bird attacks. The making-of documentary goes into some detail on this so I will be brief. Basically, Hitchcock was dissatisfied with the idea of using a blue-screen process for the travelling matte shots required to insert the bird attacks. He found the ideal substitute in the “sodium travelling matte process” originated by the Disney studios which avoids the blue halos around the edges of objects which is produced by blue screen. The splendidly named Ub Iwerks, from Disney, was brought in to act as a consultant on The Birds and the result is very special. Even if one were to play Devil’s advocate and point out that you can still see the matte process – there’s no halo but the levels of depth are a little askew (and if that sounds confused then it is) – then I would suggest that the same happens with even the very best CGI. All these ‘effect processes’ look what they are – processes – and should be judged on how well they are achieved within that parameter. On these terms, the bird attack sequences are triumphant. The scene where the sparrows fly into the living room through the fireplace is still a delicious shock moment and the lengthy bird attack on the town centre is a gruelling testament to Hitchcock’s ability to make you squirm. However, what makes the effects work so well is that they are integrated completely into a series of well planned set-pieces. The attack on the town wouldn’t be so effective without the blackly funny touch of the man incinerating himself with a casually dropped match. Nor would the assault on the school be as impressive without that memorable build up where every cut away from Melanie sees more birds amassing on the jungle gym. It’s all to do with a combination of detailed planning and ruthless cunning – Hitchcock had both in spades.

His ruthlessness shows in other ways during the film. I don’t just mean the slightly sadistic streak which led him to ‘forget’ to let Tippi Hedren know that the scene where Melanie is attacked in the attic was going to be done with real birds after all rather than the mechanical ones she was promised; a week-long ordeal which Hitchcock apparently protracted beyond endurance. It’s there in the casual cruelty doled out to humanity during the film and particularly in the scenes where children are attacked. It was rare in 1963 for children to be treated quite so callously, at least in a mainstream film with a contemporary setting, and Hitchcock seems to relish the scenes where horrible little brats run around screaming with fake birds attached to their collars. It can also be detected in the viciously funny portrait of Mitch’s mother who is far more of an ice-queen than the ‘cool blonde’ heroine. As I said in my review of Marnie, Hitch was good on the subject of mothers, the more horrendous the better. Mitch’s mother doesn’t quite come in the same league of monstrousness as Mrs Bates or Bruno’s adoring mater in Strangers on a Train but she’s an incisive portrait of upper middle-class America at its most emotionally frozen. One of the many interesting aspects of Hitchcock’s work which I haven’t touched on in this series of reviews is why there are relatively few portraits of fathers in his work compared to the multiplicity of mothers. I might get round to this when I finally review Stage Fright but that’s by the by.

Some critics are very eloquent about the meaning of The Birds and none more so than Robin Wood. I have referred to Mr Wood several times during these reviews and, although I find some of his theories a little too strained to be credible, his book “Hitchcock’s Films Revisited” is one of only two or three books which every fan of the director needs to read. His writing on The Birds is particularly interesting. He reads the film as a study of the way in which the unpredictable inevitably invades the normal and sees the birds as the representation of that basic vulnerability which all human beings have when placed in situations they could not have foreseen. This seems to me a very useful way of looking at the film. I think that, in this respect, The Birds is an extension of Hitchcock’s favourite theme – the manner in which chaos cannot be evaded. It can be bricked up, locked out, ignored or run away from, but it can never be completely escaped. Once faced up to, the chaos (the basic fear of civilised man) can be fought and sometimes defeated. But all too often it will either triumph (as it does at the end of Vertigo when Scotty makes an eternal leap into the maelstrom) or, more often, the battle ends in an uneasy ceasefire – and the final scene of The Birds is an simple and eloquent summation of his theme. The ending of the story is left open, but the thematic ending is plainly stated. We live on a knife-edge between the normal and the irrational and we ignore this at our peril – in this film, the birds seem to be reminding us of it. There’s a strong apocalyptic edge here, both to the imagery (the burning as witnessed from on-high) and the ideas. The drunk who joyously shouts “It’s the end of the world” may not have it far wrong. Within this context, it doesn’t really matter why the birds have turned on us. They are, in that dreadful phrase, a thematic deus-ex-machina, or to put it another way, a memento mori. There is psychological meaning here too – in a way, are we not all birds in our own little cages, singing our songs in the shadow of the bars? Is the anarchic ecstasy of the unfettered birds any worse than lonely, frigid emotions? Or perhaps there is a Freudian element at play. The birds could represent the invasive sexuality of Melanie invading the Brenner household – a hysterical mother points out late in the film that the attacks didn’t start until Melanie arrived. Like so many of Hitchcock’s films, The Birds is a remarkably open text and it positively invited theoretical readings. Many people, on the other hand, couldn’t care less about such academic matters and prefer to celebrate the fact that the film is a fantastic suspense movie.

The weakness of The Birds lies in the acting more than anything else and even this criticism is limited to the inexperienced Tippi Hedren and the boring-as-usual Rod Taylor. Hedren got better and Taylor was often much worse. But Jessica Tandy is excellent, restraining her personal warmth and creating a chill whenever she’s around, and there are good contributions from Suzanne Pleshette in the complex, sad role of Annie Hayworth and the delightful veteran Ethel Griffies as an eccentric ornithologist. But the stars of the film are the technicians – I’ve already sung the praises of DP Robert Burks and editor George Tomasini time and again and I also want to mention the wizardry of matte artist Albert Whitlock whose backgrounds are stunningly good. The sound is also remarkable – a collaboration between Bernard Herrmann who acted as an overall co-ordinator for the electronic sound by Remi Gassmann and Oskar Sala. It was only on my second viewing that I realised there was no music score in the film. That’s indicative of the kind of spell which The Birds casts. It’s an intense, scary and immensely satisfying two hours which are spent in the hands of a true master of cinema.

The Disc

The anamorphic 1.85:1 transfer of The Birds is gorgeous and an improvement on the old disc. The colours and sharpness are exactly right and there’s loads of detail throughout. The level of grain is pleasing without being excessive and the overall effect is just more vibrant. The mono soundtrack is also excellent – the soundtracks have been a constant pleasure in this Masterpiece Collection set.

As for extras, the lengthy documentary from the original release, All About The Birds, is present on a bonus disc which leaves us with some short snippets which are interesting but unsatisfying. There’s a deleted scene, present in the form of stills and script extracts, and the original ending presented via storyboards and script. The former is dispensable, the latter would (in my view) have been disastrous. We also get the storyboards for the attack on Melanie in the attic bedroom. The sheer detail of these is unusual. Ten minutes of Tippi Hedren’s screen test are present and fascinating for the way they demonstrate how much work Hitchcock and his wife must have done with her to get her acting skills up to snuff. There are two newsreel extracts – a silly promotional reel and an amusing speech given by Hitchcock to the National Press Club. The usual production photographs and production notes are present along with the very amusing trailer, another Hitchcock special which deserves not to be spoiled.

The film has optional subtitles in English but this does not extend to the newsreels, the screen test or the trailer.

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