Review: The Birds (1963)

For just under five years, I worked for a small publishing company on the northern fringes of Evanston, IL. To get to this job, I had to take a long train ride north from Chicago to the next-to-last stop on the CTA's Purple Line and walk along Central Street, crossing a bridge over the North Shore Channel and passing a public golf course.

The river is lined with trees on either side, and wildlife liked to pass through on occasion. (Once, on a sub-zero January afternoon, I saw a fawn standing in the middle of the frozen river, staring at me as I was staring at her.) And occasionally--sometimes in morning, sometimes at night, sometimes in springtime, sometimes in fall--crows would gather in these trees and call to one another incessantly, almost loud enough to drown out the traffic rushing by. The sight of these crows, gathered in large numbers for no reason explicable to human eyes, always made me unspeakably nervous and invariably quickened my step even though, had they decided to take flight and blacken the sky with their wings, there was no place for me to hide.

And I blame this unspeakable nervousness entirely on Channel 7 and Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.

Channel 7--also known as WLS, the local ABC affiliate--ran movies every afternoon at three (just in time for kids coming home from school) and liked to have theme weeks, like "war movie week" or "western week"--or "horror movie week." And even within this structure, there were variations: They would show a week's worth of Christopher Lee's Dracula flicks or giant monsters on the rampage, like Kink Kong or Godzilla (or, if we were really unfortunate, King Kong vs. Godzilla). But one of Channel 7's favorite movies to show during their mini-horror-film fests was The Birds. And unlike most of the other films they showed, The Birds never failed to frighten me--perhaps because has plausibility that most horror films lack.

Think about it. We know that vampires and werewolves don't exist and that you can't build a human being out of spare parts dug up in graveyards (not yet, anyway). Mummies don't get up and walk around after 3,000 years, and dinosaurs are dead, dead, dead.

But birds? We see and hear them every day. Sparrows chirping merrily in bushes. Cardinals calling their mates from the heights of maple trees. Seagulls scavenging for scraps in shopping mall parking lots. Crows massed along the banks of an otherwise peaceful river. As one character in The Birds helpfully points out, there are millions of species of birds in the world, and if they ever got the idea to get together and start killing people, "we wouldn't stand a chance."

The Birds is adapted from a novella by Daphne du Maurier, modified by screenwriter Evan Hunter to move the setting from England to the California coastline and modifying the ending to lend a sliver of hope to the audience. Newcomer Tippi Hedren stars as Melanie. (Funny, but that's her real-life daughter's name as well--Melanie Griffith. Coincidence?). She's another in a long line of tall, cool Hitchcock blondes, and she becomes involved with hunky Mitch (Rod Taylor), who has a young daughter (Veronica Cartwright) and a strong-willed mother (Jessica Tandy).

Mitch and family live in Bodega Bay, a quiet coastal community--quiet, that is, until birds start attacking human beings.

Wisely, no explanation is ever given as to why the birds do what they do here. Any explanation would undercut the terror the attack scenes instill, and such attacks, while exceptionally rare and never involving more than one species of bird at a time, do take place in real life. (While getting ready for work this morning, I heard a news report of a bald eagle attacking vacationers at a beach--it seemed to be especially fond of footballs--and, yes, the newscaster played an audio clip from The Birds.)

The bird attacks scenes themselves are frightening technical marvels. Back in the days before computer-generated effects, Hitchcock and Universal's special effects department resorted to optical effects, paintings, mechanical birds and horrible makeup to lay out the devastated landscape. But terrific special effects and momentary scares, which would be plenty for most directors, aren't enough for Hitchcock. He takes his ability to build tension until it's nearly unbearable before springing his traps. Is a disaster worse when you can see it developing but are powerless to prevent it? That's the position Hitchcock puts the audience in again and again.

Consider the scene in which Melanie goes to the local school to pick up Mitch's daughter. Melanie waits outside the school, smoking a cigarette while listening to the children sing. She faces the audience, and behind her we can see a small playground with a set of monkey bars. One by one, crows gather on the monkey bars. The audience can see this, but Melanie can't. So she continues to smoke calmly. The children continue to sing. Crows continue to gather. Each close-up of Melanie is tighter and tighter. Finally, Melanie catches sight of a crow in flight and follows its arc until it lands in the playground, which is now black with crows. Melanie's eyes widen with horror. She realizes what the audience did minutes before her: she and the children are trapped, and there may be no way out.

Combine this talent for constructing tension--honed by Hitchcock in many thrillers before this one--with the realistic setting and sympathetic characters, and you have one seriously unsettling moviegoing experience that stands the test of time. The Birds never ceases to amaze and scare me.

And I'll never cease to be weirded out by crows.

Thank you, Mr. Hitchcock.