The Birds

Movie Review: The Birds

Year of Release: 1963
Country of Origin: USA
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Cast: Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleshette, Tippi Hedren

Plot outline: A wealthy San Francisco socialite pursues a potential boyfriend to a small Northern California town that slowly takes a turn for the bizarre when birds of all kinds suddenly begin to attack people there in increasing numbers and with increasing viciousness (IMDb).

Based on the short story of the same name by Daphne du Maurier, The Birds provides one of cinema’s most chilling apocalyptic visions of the future. The movie begins slowly, heading down what looks like a familiar cosy lane, and then suddenly it veers off sharply to the left, becoming a completely different kind of movie to the one any audience might have expected. This is Hitchcock’s most horrifying and darkest movie, because it deals with the bleakest of subjects: the extinction of the human race. The movie was to be Hitchcock’s most technically challenging movie, making use of state of the art special effects which look pretty good even by today’s standards. These effects earned the movie an Oscar nomination, but as it turned out the Academy felt that Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s historical epic Cleopatra should be the recipient of the Best Special Effects award that year - an outcome that is incomprehensible to anyone who has ever seen both movies. The Birds has some of the most disturbing and suspenseful sequences of any Hitchcock movies. Most memorable is the manically edited sequence in which Tippi Hedren is mauled for what seems like an eternity by psychopathic birds in a creepy attic. This manages to surpass the famous Janet Leigh murder scene in Psycho in its visceral shock value and relentless brutality. One of the things which most contributes to the unsettling and very distinctive mood of the movie is its eerie electronic effects, which are used in place of a conventional movie score. These effects mimic the sound of birds and are played over sequences where there is no human speech. This, together with the dominating bird’s eye shots, adds to the impression of the birds rapidly gaining ascendancy over human beings. The ending of the movie has been criticised for its apparent ambiguity, although from the final shot, in which thousands of birds assemble to watch the humans make a last dash for freedom, it is self-evident how the story will pan out. The immense poetry and horror of that final shot contains within it a powerful statement on the transience of things. We may think we are secure, but there will come a day when humans will no longer be the masters of the Earth. Our end may come in a million years’ time - or it may be tomorrow. (JT)

My judgement: ***1/2 out of 4 stars