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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 38.55%
Worth A Look: 27.71%
Average: 7.23%
Pretty Bad: 10.84%
Total Crap: 15.66%
3 reviews, 65 user ratings
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| Birds, The |
by DarkHorse
"A well-done Hitchcock thriller..."
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"Suspense and shock beyond anything you have seen or imagined!"
This quote was borrowed from Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" when it was first released. Does that lofty tagline hold true today? Of course not...Almost 40 years later, we have seen people assaulted by killer bees, bats, frogs, snakes, slugs, sharks, rats and even tomatoes. You name a nature's revenge scenario and it's been done. Ok, maybe there hasn't been a movie involving giant squirrels yet, but I bet some studio has the screenplay, collecting dust somewhere, waiting to "shock and amaze" you.
Alfred Hitchcock waited three years after Psycho to release his next movie (before then he was averaging roughly a movie a year.) Needless to say, there was a great deal of anticipation when The Birds finally hit the screen in 1963. It would be his third adaptation of a novel by Daphne Du Maurier. The first was an uncredited, and uninspiring, adaptation of Jamaica Inn in 1939. Perhaps it was a tinge of guilt that prompted him to release a superior adaptation of a Du Maurier novel a year later. The result was the brilliant and chilling Rebecca. This marked Hitch's first foray into Hollywood, it was his first collaboration with producer David O. Selznick and was his only movie to receive the Academy Award for Best Picture. Excuse the pun, but The Birds was a bird of a different feather.
One of Hitchcock's calling cards has always been his masterful use of music to build suspense. In The Birds, the only score you'll hear is chirps and caws. This keeps the focus precisely where it should be; on our fine feathered fiends.
Most of the criticism I have read on this movie is that the characters are paper-thin. Granted, but isn't that really the point? The real stars here are the birds and Hitchcock doesn't let you forget it. They are in practically every scene. They are either benignly chirping in the background or descending upon a group of children and pecking the living shit out of them. If there is a scene in The Birds as memorable as the shower sequence in Psycho, it is the claustrophobic scene where Tippi Hedren is trapped inside a phone booth while numerous birds try to get at her.
The lack of character development was easy for me to overlook because of the choice of actors. Rod Taylor was one of the most charismatic actors of his time (for further evidence check him out in H.G Well's The Time Machine.) Tippi Hedren is stunning (it is no wonder that Hitch was rumored to have been groping her behind the scenes.) Tippi's offspring was Melanie Griffith, by the way.
Another complaint about The Birds is that it never fully explains why the birds decide to wage all-out war on humanity. My opinion is that this is explained in the opening sequence when Rod Taylor is in a bird store looking for a pair of Love Birds. He asks Hedren if it makes her feel bad that the birds are caged and kept separate from the other species. She is indifferent. I believe the film is trying to make a statement about the human superiority complex. Perhaps Hitchcock's cameo, in which he is shown walking his two dogs on a leash, was intended to drive that point home. When the birds are seen congregating in the background, and choose not to attack, maybe they are giving us a taste of our own medicine by making Bodega Bay a human cage. If this movie were made today their motives would probably be spoon-fed by way of a nearby nuclear reactor or some such nonsense.
Then again, Du Maurier herself said she got the idea for the story while watching a farmer ploughing his fields. As she watched seagulls "screaming and crying" as they dove for food around him, she wondered what it would be like if they lost interest in worms. So maybe it was just a matter of fancy. Whatever conclusions you draw, The Birds is a fun thriller full of Hitchcock's trademark wit and style."The Birds" is by no means Alfred Hitchcock's greatest movie but it is a great movie. It has held up remarkably well over the years. Avoid the sequel like the plague.
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=1274&reviewer=167
originally posted: 06/01/00 02:20:58
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USA
28-Mar-1963 (PG)
DVD: 14-Oct-2003
UK
N/A
Australia
N/A
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