The Birds ***** (1963, Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, Suzanne Pleshette, Jessica Tandy, Veronica Cartwright) – Classic Movie Review 18

Based on a tale by Daphne du Maurier, author of two other of his film adaptations, Rebecca and Jamaica Inn, the 1963 horror mystery drama The Birds is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most distinguished, unnerving and influential thrillers.

The film stars Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren in her screen debut, supported by Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleshette and Veronica Cartwright. The screenplay is by Evan Hunter, freely adapting Daphne du Maurier’s 1952 short story after being asked by Hitchcock to develop new characters and a more elaborate plot but keep the original title and concept of unexplained violent bird attacks on people.

In her finest hour in the cinema, the highly estimable but shamefully undervalued Tippi Hedren stars as sleek and sophisticated San Francisco woman Melanie Daniels, a cool blonde loner who meets by chance a stranger, lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor), in an exotic bird shop. Somehow he gets under her skin with his impudent charm, and she impulsively follows him with a gift of a pair of lovebirds to his Californian coastal home in Bodega Bay, where there’s a sudden, inexplicable attack by vicious birds.

Melanie meets Mitch’s neurotic widowed mom (Jessica Tandy), young sister (Veronica Cartwright) and his equally lonely ex-girlfriend Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette), the local schoolmarm. They are an odd little crew, indeed.

A commanding Hitchcock moves relentlessly on, from witty banter to easy-going romance to a creepy mood of foreboding to stark, outright horror as the bird attacks become ever nastier, then lethal. Wisely, he makes no comment on the nature of the attacks, offering no explanation, leaving up to the viewer to puzzle out the meaning of the birds.

The film climaxes in a terrifying scene in which Melanie is trapped with murderous crows in one of cinema’s creepiest attics.

Hedren is the perfect fit for her part, suggesting a world of hurt and fear concealed under the perfect shell of her chilly personality and perfect, international glamour-model beauty. Making the movie, Hedren went through hell to please an allegedly apparently sadistically inclined Hitchcock. We’ll never quite know what went on – no movie is worth risk of serious injury or death – but Hedren didn’t suffer in vain. The movie is a cinema masterwork.

Even with its serious undertow, it is continually gripping and entertaining, and, though you can see the flaws in the valiant old-style process work (how easy it would all be to do this on computers!), it is still heart-poundingly scary and uniquely disturbing.

At the 36th Academy Awards, Ub Iwerks was nominated for Best Special Effects but Emil Kosa Jr won for Cleopatra.

And influential? It started the whole fashion for disaster movies and horror thrillers that is still in vogue today. That is probably what keeps The Birds still fresh, effective and relevant.

In a clever move that helps the eerie atmosphere, there is no actual music, just electronic bird effects arranged by composer Bernard Herrmann (credited as ‘sound consultant’). Hitchcock decided not to have a conventional incidental score, but use sound effects and some source music to counterpoint silences. He wanted to use the electroacoustic Mixtur-Trautonium, a predecessor to the synthesizer he heard on Berlin radio in the late 1920s, and asked Oskar Sala and Remi Gassmann (credited with ‘electronic sound production and composition’) to design an electronic soundtrack.

Daphne du Maurier’s novella The Birds was first published in her 1952 short story collection The Apple Tree. Its main character is a farm hand living in her beloved Cornwall, and its conclusion is far more pessimistic than the film’s ambiguous ending, for which Hitchcock cut the last 10 pages of the screenplay.

And life imitates art. The film also had a real-life inspiration – a mass bird attack on the seaside town of Capitola in California on 18 August 1961 when residents awoke to hordes of seabirds dive-bombing their homes, crashing into cars and spewing half-digested anchovies onto lawns. Alfred Hitchcock heard about this and used aspects of it in his film then being made. The then unknown cause of the birds’ attack was toxic algae.

Though most of the birds are real, more than $200,000 was spent on mechanical birds.

Perhaps by coincidence, Hedren’s film-star daughter Melanie Griffith (born August 9, 1957) shares her character’s forename.

Morgan Brittany, who plays Brunette Girl at Birthday Party (uncredited), was then known under her real name as Suzanne Cupito. Her big break came in Gypsy (1962) as Natalie Wood’s sister, and her fame peaked in the TV soap Dallas (1978). She is a conservative political commentator.

Hedren much later claimed Hitchcock acted inappropriately towards her several times during the filming of The Birds. But in a 2016 interview with Larry King she said that his alleged sexual advances had not started during The Birds and ‘didn’t happen until we were almost finished with Marnie’, and that up until the end of Marnie Hitchcock had been ‘easy to work with’. In her memoir published about the same time, she repeated the earlier allegations, though said the sexual advances didn’t begin until Marnie.

She also alleged she was injured during the filming of the phone booth attack scene, and suffered cuts to her face from a pane of glass shattering on her. She said she was misled about the the final attack sequence, where mechanical birds were replaced with real ones at the last minute. These allegations were not made until after Hitchcock’s death and have never been confirmed.

Hitchcock as Man Walking Dogs Out of Pet Shop.

Hitch appears in his customary cameo as the man with white dogs in front of the pet shop. Here he is leaving the shop with two of his own Sealyham terriers, Geoffrey and Stanley, as star Tippi Hedren enters.

Also in the cast are Ethel Griffies, Charles McGraw (as Sebastian Sholes, the fisherman in the diner), Joe Mantell, Elizabeth Wilson, Doodles Weaver, Richard Deacon, Ruth McDevitt, Malcolm Atterbury, Karl Swenson, Lonny Chapman, John McGovern, Doreen Lang and Bill Quinn.

The making of the movie is examined in the TV film The Girl (2012).

The schoolhouse where they filmed in Bodega, California, is supposedly haunted.

Rod Taylor, also star of the 1960 The Time Machine, died on 7 January 2015, aged 84.

Suzanne Pleshette died on 19 January 2008, aged 70.

The cast are Rod Taylor as Mitch Brenner, Jessica Tandy as Lydia Brenner, Suzanne Pleshette as Annie Hayworth, Tippi Hedren as Melanie Daniels, Veronica Cartwright as Cathy Brenner, Ethel Griffies as ornithologist Mrs. Bundy, Charles McGraw as fisherman Sebastian Sholes, Ruth McDevitt as bird shop owner Mrs. MacGruder, Lonny Chapman as innkeeper Deke Carter, Joe Mantell as cynical businessman, Doodles Weaver as fisherman helping with rental boat, Malcolm Atterbury as Deputy Al Malone, John McGovern as postal clerk, Karl Swenson as drunken doomsayer in diner, Richard Deacon as Mitch’s San Francisco neighbour, Elizabeth Wilson as Deke’s wife Helen Carter, William Quinn as Sam, and Alfred Hitchcock as a man walking dogs out of the pet shop.

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http://derekwinnert.com/jamaica-inn-classic-film-review-390/

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© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 18

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