Review: The Birds (1963)

The Birds

Rating

Director

Alfred Hitchcock

Screenplay

Evan Hunter (Story: Daphne Du Maurier)

Length

1h 59m

Starring

Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleshette, Tippi Hedren, Veronica Cartwright, Ethel Griffies, Charles McGraw, Ruth McDevitt, Lonny Chapman

MPAA Rating

PG-13

Review

If you’ve never had an unhealthy fear of winged creatures, you’ve probably never seen The Birds, one of the Master of Suspense’s handful of vaunted horror features.

This film sets itself on a small island in Bodega Bay near San Francisco. There, socialite Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) meets lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) in a pet shop. Buying a pair of lovebirds he was eying, Melanie rents a boat to head to the island, hoping to leave the gift without being seen. She meets Mitch’s ex-lover (Suzanne Pleshette) to learn his daughter’s (Veronica Cartwright) name as it’s for her birthday. Melanie is attacked by a gull at the wharf, the first sign of something sinister in the air. Mitch tends to her wound and invites her to dinner where she meets his imperious mother (Jessica Tandy). Things only get worse from there.

Three years after defining the slasher picture with Psycho, Alfred Hitchcok redefined the creature feature, avoiding mystical, fantastical, or literary critters and going for an animal everyone sees around them on a regular basis. He puts that intimacy to the test and suggesting that they are all carefully watching with the ability to attack at a moment’s notice. By focusing on three types of birds, seagulls, crows, and sparrows, Hitchcock enables audiences from various environments to feel and appreciate the terror their avian villainy can rain down.

Based on a Daphne du Maurier novel, Hitch’s third such adaptation, you could be forgiven for not remembering the screenwriter of this film, Evan Hunter. Although Hunter presents a perfectly enticing screenplay, Hitchcock was a master filmmaker who made the source material almost vanish within his signature styles. Less dependent on literary trappings, Hitchcock makes the premise come alive, with nervous tension and a healthy fear of a mass bird attack. It isn’t quite as good as Psycho but The Birds stands on its own as a testament to his skill of making outrageous situations and premises seem utterly plausible.

On the whole, The Birds is a bit more gruesome than Psycho, at least in its depiction of death. It also doesn’t have quite the influence of its predecessor. Regardless, what The Birds sets down for audiences was a way for a horror film about everyday creatures and objects that can reach into the psyche and pluck those hidden fears lying just below the surface. You never thought you could be afraid of a gaggle of geese, a murder of crows, or any number of other groupings of birds but this film not only showed that you could, it probably instilled a healthy concern about whether they really could turn on humanity one day.