The Birds (1963) Review

The Birds (1963) Review

 

After scaring the pants off audiences with Psycho, auteur director Alfred Hitchcock set his sights on a new movie villain of the avian variety. The Birds came out toward the end of his career, and considerably fewer cinephiles rank it among his all-time best in comparison to earlier pictures like Vertigo, Rear Window, North by Northwest and the aforementioned Psycho, among many others…and yet, The Birds is still considered one of Hitchcock’s best films, and it’s certainly as iconic as anything else he made.

Tippi Hedren plays Melanie Daniels, a rich woman who had an unflattering story printed about her in a rival newspaper to her father’s newspaper, and a lawyer, Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) recognizes her from it while browsing a pet store for lovebirds to buy for his baby sister. Mitch messes with Melanie and embarrasses her, but she’s clearly taken with him from the get go, because she brazenly buys two lovebirds, drives all the way to Bodega Bay where Mitch is staying with his sister and overbearing mother, and even goes so far as to rent a boat to sneak up to the house and drop them off. Mitch sees her and drives to the dock to meet up with her. As she returns to the dock, a seagull dive-bombs her head and draws blood. It’s a strange little incident, and an omen of things to come.

Melanie ends up staying with the Brenner’s and witnesses just how cold Mitch’s mother is, but she adores his younger sister Cathy, and is quickly falling for Mitch. There’s not much time for a romantic fling, though, because the bird incidents escalate and propagate—seagulls attack Cathy and her friends at her birthday party, an entire flock of sparrows flies down the chimney, and at the height of the attacks, the skies are literally blotted out by swarms of crows and gulls, attacking everyone and causing total mayhem. Melanie and the Brenners end up barricading themselves in the house, waiting, hoping the attacks stop.

The influence The Birds has had on the horror genre is evident, going far beyond the killer animal sub-genre. It exhibits traits of what would become standard fare for survival horror, with the characters going out to rescue their loved ones from the impending danger, boarding up the windows and doors of the house for safety, and fending off attacks from inside the house. We’ve seen it in everything from zombie apocalypses like Night of the Living Dead (1968) and REC (2007) to alien invasions like Signs (2002) and War of the Worlds (2005), but The Birds is among the earlier examples. It’s remembered most for scenes that have frightened viewers for decades, such as when Mitch’s mother Lydia discovers a man whose eyes have been pecked out, but The Birds is really more about the suspense, which is what Hitchcock was so well known for. The birds don’t attack until later on, with the first half of the film largely made up of dialogue scenes and banter between the characters. 

There is no music to speak of throughout the entire movie. The sounds of birds flapping their wings and their warped squawks all blend together to become the soundtrack of the film, emphasizing the horror of their attack scenes. One particularly disturbing scene has Melanie picking up Cathy from school, and while she waits outside the school house, the children sing a repetitive song, which forms the background music as a crow lands on the playground behind her, followed by a few more, then a few more, until the entire playground is covered in crows: an effective build-up before the attack.  

One of the most iconic moments is when Melanie hides in the phone booth during the big attack sequence, with the birds going crazy outside. It’s a terrifying concept: she’s locked in a phone booth, but she doesn’t even try to pick up the phone and call for help, because who could you call to save you in a situation like this? The birds flit about and she spins in circles, pressing her hands on the glass walls. She was the superior species in the pet store earlier in the film, looking in on the caged birds. Now she’s the one in a cage, and the birds have the upper hand.

A big element of killer animal films is the special effects. Sometimes the effects don’t always hold up, but if the other elements like story, characters, and plot are strong enough, it can give it lasting qualities (Jaws). In other instances the effects are good for the time, but become dated and therefore the movie loses notoriety as the years go on because of weaker elements (Deep Blue Sea). The Birds might seem like the kind of movie to have dated effects, and while that’s true in certain regards, the majority of the birds used in the film were actual live birds—hundreds of them, in fact, and they still exude menace, especially when they congregate and descend on the village. The shots that don’t hold up are the rear projection shots, such as when Melanie is on the boat and when there are many birds flying high-speed past people. Surprisingly, few fake birds are easy to spot in most shots. On a technical level, The Birds is one of Hitchcock’s more elaborate productions, and a lot of the effects are still acceptable even six decades later.

I kept thinking to myself as I was watching, why doesn’t The Birds hold up as well as Jaws? Both are among the most revered killer animal films ever made (Spielberg’s approach to Jaws has even been called Hitchcockian) though to compare them, they are very different films. To me, it comes down to three main points: the special effects, the animals in question, and the endings. Not all the shots of the shark in Jaws hold up, but there are fewer instances compared to The Birds. In fact, the birds are shown quite a lot, though Hitchcock’s feathery fiends didn’t present the same option as Spielberg’s shark by living in the ocean, making it easier to show a fin here and there or nothing at all. The reason for the birds attacking is never explained, which makes it scarier in one sense, but less satisfying in another. In Jaws, the shark is just doing what sharks do: hunting. Jaws spends the entire second half of the film focused on defeating evil. The shark must be killed, and when it finally is, it’s a stand-up-out-of-your-seat-and-cheer finale. The Birds is more of a gruelling horror that keeps creeping up with no sense of hope at the end, and the very ending isn’t that satisfying.

The Birds might not pack the same punch today as it did when it came out decades prior, but it’s still an impressive display of technical filmmaking and undeniable suspense. The dialogue scenes go on a little too long in the first half, and it’s not quite as classic as some of Hitchcock’s other films, but in the realm of killer animal films, The Birds is as classic as they come.