The Birds (film)
The Birds (
1963) is a
horror film by
Alfred Hitchcock, loosely based on a
short story by
Daphne Du Maurier with the
same name. Hitchcock had earlier turned Du Maurier's
novel Rebecca into an acclaimed film. It is one of the most famous horror films and was also significant as one of Hitchcock's last great films. The special effects and soundtrack of the film are extraordinary for its time. Later films in the "revenge of nature" genre were influenced both by its content and its style.
The
screenplay for
The Birds was written by Evan Hunter, better known as
crime fiction novelist
Ed McBain. This film is notable in that it has no
music score per se (other than brief source music); instead a montage of assorted
bird calls and
sound effects put together by perennial Hitchcock composer
Bernard Herrmann provides the "incidental music".
In the film, various kinds of
birds attack
Bodega Bay,
California (
Sonoma County), a seaside
village. In Du Maurier's story, the birds attack
Britain, not California.
A quasi-sequel to the film was produced for cable TV in
1994 under the title
The Birds II: Land's End. Starring
Brad Johnson and
Chelsea Field, it was not a success. (Tippi Hedren appeared in a supporting role playing a different character from in the first film.)
The young socialite Melanie (
Tippi Hedren) visits a downtown
San Francisco pet shop on a Friday afternoon. Outside,
seagulls gather menacingly in nearby
Union Square. She meets Mitch (
Rod Taylor), a lawyer who is looking for a pair of
lovebirds to give to his little sister for her birthday. The young lady pretends to be the shopkeeper, showing him various types of birds (and mostly misidentifying them), until she accidentally releases a
canary in the store. When Mitch reveals after the incident that he knows her as Melanie Daniels, the daughter of a newspaper magnate, and tells her off for being a spoiled prankster, she decides to get back at him by buying him the lovebirds he couldn't obtain and delivering them to his apartment the next morning. It turns out that Mitch spends his weekends in Bodega Bay, a small coastal town to the north of the city.
Arriving in Bodega Bay, she seeks out Annie Hayworth (
Suzanne Pleshette), the local school teacher, in order to learn the name of Mitch's sister Cathy (
Veronica Cartwright). Then she travels across the bay by boat and stealthily enters Mitch's house, placing the present in the living room, but not before being spotted by Mitch. On her way back, a
seagull inexplicably swoops down and gashes her forehead.
Cleaning up her wounds, Melanie gives Mitch the alibi that Annie was an old friend of hers and she wanted to pay a visit, which he immediately recognizes as a lie. She then returns to Annie's house, rents a room for the weekend, and later heads over to Mitch's house for dinner. There, his mother, Lydia (
Jessica Tandy), argues with Fred Brinkmeyer over the phone that the chicken feed she bought from his store, was defective—her
chickens wouldn't eat a bite—only to learn that a local farmer's own fowl, who had been fed a different brand, have the same problem. After dinner, Melanie returns to Annie's house and the two are chatting about Mitch and his mother over a brandy when a thud is heard against the front door. Answering the door, Melanie discovers a dead seagull sprawled on the porch.
The next day, Cathy has a birthday party. A peaceful flock of birds makes its way across the clear blue sky as Melanie and Mitch walk along a bluff above the coast. Melanie reveals that her mother left their family when she was Cathy's age. Suddenly a bird swoops down and switches Cathy on the ear, and an attack on the party commences. Terrified children rush into the house as birds scratch, peck, and bite at them ravenously and without any apparent motive.
From then on things go from bad to worse, as bird attacks increase both in scope and severity. On Monday morning, Lydia drives to the farm whose owner's chickens are also refusing to eat and discovers a gory corpse with its eyes gouged out. After fleeing the scene in hysteria, Lydia takes to her bed, but she can't rest because she is worried about Cathy at school. Melanie offers to go retrieve the child. A large flock of
crows gathers in the playground, and when Melanie helps evacuate the school, they viciously tear at the children, nearly killing one of them.
At the Tides Restaurant, an elderly Ornithologist (Ethel Griffies) opines that humanity wouldn't stand a chance against the hundred billion or more birds on earth, whom she smugly regards as harmless—until another attack begins outside. After a gull swoops down onto a
gas station attendant, a trail of gasoline makes its way into the restaurant's parking lot, where a man is lighting a cigar. The garbled warning cries of bystanders are misunderstood, and the resulting shattering explosion soon alerts scores of birds, who attack everyone who cannot manage to get indoors. Melanie runs to assist, but she quickly retreats to a
phone booth after she too is assailed by the birds. From that vantage point, she bears witness to a horrific spectacle as birds rush at her from all angles. The local
fire department soon arrives to fight the fire and ends up fighting the birds instead. A dying man stumbles toward the phone booth, but he quickly collapses and leaves a streak of blood on the glass, which the birds then begin to shatter by flying directly into it. Finally, Mitch ventures into the storm and brings her back into the restaurant, where a hysterical mother (Doreen Lang) accuses her of being the cause of the attacks, and Melanie reacts by slapping the woman around the face.
At last, the screeching of the birds comes to an end. Melanie sets out in search of Annie and Cathy. Annie lies dead on her porch, while a terrified Cathy uncontrollably sobs inside. Melanie comforts Cathy and Mitch takes the body into the house as dusk approaches.
Cathy, Melanie, Mitch, and Lydia hole up in their house, boarding up all the windows, doors, and openings, with the exception of a single fireplace in which a fire is kept burning all night long. In this
claustrophobic setting, the four spend hours wondering when the next attack will come. Finally, a clamor erupts, and Mitch quickly checks and repairs breaches while the others scurry from one corner of living room to another, acting like caged birds terrified out of their wits. The power goes out, and Mitch gets a
flashlight.
|
Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren in The Birds. |
The attack subsides. Before dawn, Melanie wakes up with the intuition that something is terribly wrong. She grabs Mitch's flashlight and carefully examines the rooms, then cautiously treads the stairs, opens the door to Cathy's bedroom, and goes inside. Birds attack her from all sides as she gazes at a gigantic hole in the ceiling. Unable to fight, she collapses onto the floor, nearly dying before Mitch and Lydia rescue her. Realizing that she is in shock and needs to get to a hospital, Mitch tells the others that they have to leave. He daringly ventures outside to get the car. Here, Hitchcock offers one of the most
surreal and
apocalyptic scenes to appear in the film, as a sea of landed birds ripples menacingly around him, but don't attack. Mitch quietly enters the garage and turns on the car radio, which reports that bird attacks have occurred further inland, mentioning the town of
Santa Rosa, California, about thirty miles away. He brings the car around front and helps Cathy, Melanie, and Lydia inside, then drives away, parting waves of birds that seem to lie in anticipation of something.
It was important to Hitchcock never to explain in the movie
why the birds attack humans. Thus, the attacks are either interpreted as the revenge of nature, as a sign of the apocalypse or as a
cold war threat. Another theory states that the attacks always occur when the superficiality of human relationships surfaces in the movie: the flirtatious conversations of Melanie and Mitch, the fear of loneliness, the rejection of Melanie by Mitch's mother. One suggestion is that the birds only finally rest after they have pinpointed the focus of their anger or fear, i.e. Melanie, and attacked and neutralised it. The caged lovebirds brought along throughout the movie are thought by some to serve as a subtle justification for the bird attacks. In all probability, however, Hitchcock most probably deliberately leaves questions unanswered in the film to allow the viewer to come to his/her own conclusions.
The movie does not feature a musical soundtrack in the common sense. Instead, Hitchcock had
Oskar Sala play in bird sounds on his
Trautonium, which were then scored to the movie by
Bernard Herrmann. The fact that there are no natural bird sounds to be heard in this movie also makes it notable in the field of
musicology.
There is present however a very high-pitched, almost out of human hearing range, soundtrack of electronic noise running through the film. The purpose of this was to subconsciously add to the tension experienced by the viewer when watching the film. It was 'composed' and recorded by a group of young German men who would later form the massively influential electronic music band
Kraftwerk.
The ending to this movie is abrupt; some surmise that this was to allow the audience to make their own minds as to why these birds attacked, or what the characters' fate will be. An apocryphal story states that Hitchcock had planned an ending for the movie in which the characters succeed in reaching San Francisco only to find the birds ominously perched on Golden Gate Bridge but was forced to shelve this idea due to the expense involved.
Hitchcock also asserted that the film not end with final "The End", which further hints towards the
lyrical nature of the movie (quote by
Federico Fellini: "An apokalyptical poem"). Another film critic - in the documentary
All About The Birds described the ending as 'self-consciously 'European' in its lack of resolution'.
Hitchcock was at least partially inspired by events reported in 1960 involving birds around the world exhibiting strange and sometimes violent behavior. These events may have been caused by
amnesic shellfish poisoning caused by birds eating fish containing large amounts of
domoic acid which is sometimes produced by the
algae Pseudo-nitzschia australis.[
1]. In any instance, given that the storyline of the film bears only the faintest resemblance to Du Maurier's novel, it would appear likely that the latter was not Hitchcock's sole inspiration for making the film.
Awards
The movie was nominated for an
Oscar in the category of special effects. Tippi Hedren received the
Golden Globe for her acting in this movie, as the most promising newcomer of
1964. She shared this award with
Ursula Andress and
Elke Sommer.
Cameo
Alfred Hitchcock appears rather early in the movie, walking dogs on a leash while leaving the pet shop in which the protagonists meet. Because of his increasing fame, Hitchcock's obligatory
cameo appearances occurred earlier and earlier in movies he directed from the late '50s onward, as he feared distracting viewers from the storylines.
Trivia
Actress
Vera Miles was originally offered the role of Melanie Daniels, but she had to reject it due to pregnancy.
In an episode of
Animaniacs, the
Goodfeathers sign onto the filming of a movie called "The Boids" as extras. Several key scenes are parodied, such as the telephone wire scene and the phone booth scene. Bobby, Pesto and Squit are thoroughly injured performing the rigorous stunts required. In the end they decide that moviemaking isn't the life for them. Caricatures of Hitchock and Hedren are observed; also, one of the crows sounds like a young
Jack Nicholson.
In
Mel Brooks' movie
High Anxiety (
1978) he parodies several Hitchcock films, including The Birds (specifically, the "jungle gym" scene). Here, the birds show up on a jungle gym behind Mel Brooks, and then they "attack" him by pooping on him.
The Simpsons makes many references to this movie, one of the first being in "
A Streetcar Named Marge", when in the scene where Homer, Bart and Lisa pick up Maggie from the day-care center before attending
O! Streetcar!, the babies are perched all over the building, staring at the family and quietly sucking on
pacifiers, spoofing the surreal scene late in the movie. As part of a run-on gag, when Homer and the kids leave, a "Simpsons" version of Hitchcock is seen walking his dogs on the sidewalk past the day-care.
In the Simpsons episode "
Itchy & Scratchy Land", Marge, at a certain point when the robots in the Itchy & Scratchy theme park threaten to kill them, says: "I knew we should have gone to the bird sanctuary." In the bird sanctuary however, the birds have gone crazy like in Hitchcock's film.
Hans Moleman is shown trying to make a call in a phone booth while the birds crash against the glass, just like in a certain scene in the movie.
In "Night of the Dolphins," the final segment of
The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror XI (
2000), the invading dolphins stand on their tails on the power lines, much like the birds in Hitchcock's film.
The film
Finding Nemo has a scene with the seagulls perched everywhere, similar to a certain scene in the Hitchcock film.
In Jimmy Neutron episode "When Pants Attack," when Judy Neutron sees the swarms of pants gathering in town, she says, "Why, it looks like an homage to Alfred Hitchcock's movie
The Birds!" Also, in the same episode, you can see pants flutter onto telephone lines.
On the children's television show
Arthur, an episode titled "The Squirrels" (
2006) aired as one of the final episodes in the 10th season on the 16th of May. Arthur and his friends are terrified of squirrels after watching the horror film, "The Squirrels," an old black and white movie about squirrels attacking everyday people, an obvious homage to
The Birds. The problem is solved when Arthur and Buster's plan to get squirrels closer to them to rid themselves of fear by placing a trail of nuts backfires, causing squirrels to run into Arthur's house, and one squirrel to hurt one of its hind legs. Arthur and Buster realize they've been afraid of such a small, helpless creature, and overcomes their fear at an animal hospital where the squirrel gets treated. However, when they return to school, Binky, whom has just watched the film over the weekend, comes to school paranoid about squirrels.
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Classic Movies: The Birds (1963) *
Script of The Birds note: includes original draft ending, which was never filmed.
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Introducing 'Tippi' Hedren - Tippi Hedren and Alfred Hitchcock photo galleries*
Essay: The Birds are the manifestation of the mother's rage against rivals for her son's affection*
Filming Location*
2005 interview with Tippi Hedren about filming The Birds and how she was treated
