User Reviews

Alfred Hitchcock's "Birds" opens in a San Francisco pet store. Here we're introduced to Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) and Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor), she a young socialite, he a handsome lawyer. The duo flirt, trade witty banter and then go their separate ways. But Melanie, obviously smitten, wants more of Mitch. She purchases a pair of love birds and journeys to Mitch's home in Bodega Bay.

Melanie is typical of Hitchcock's female leads. She's svelte, statuesque, always perfectly poised and always perfectly dressed. But though he outwardly fetishized women, Hitchcock also loved to delve into their inner worlds. His film's title hints at this preoccupation; "birds" has long been a British slang term for "girls" or "women", perhaps owing to confusion with the Middle English word "burde", which also meant "young woman".

Regardless, "Birds'" first act watches as the perfectly coiffed Melanie slips into her perfectly polished Aston Martin and drives to the positively picaresque town of Bodega Bay (an obvious influence upon Steven Spielberg's Amity Island). Along the way Hitchcock treats us to immaculate compositions, masterful camera work, and a careful blend of comedy, sexiness, wit and foreboding. Most impressive, though, are the film's lethargic qualities. Much of "Birds'" first act simply watches as Melanie drives across Californian coastlines or wordlessly wanders about Bodega Bay. The film's unhurriedness, and Hitchcock's willingness to slow every set piece right down, points to a type of gracefulness and directorial confidence increasingly rare in cinema.

At Bodega Bay, Melanie becomes increasingly infatuated with Mitch. This infatuation ruffles the feathers of almost ever other woman in Bodega Bay, all of whom seem to nurse secret desires to be with Mitch. These women include Lydia (Mitch's widowed mother) and Annie (Mitch's ex girlfriend). Both are threatened by, and jealous of, Melanie's intrusion into their nest. If they can't have Mitch, nobody can.

And so the birds arrive. Expressing the unconscious desires of Bodega's women, and Mitch's mother in particular, these birds descend upon Bodega Bay. They sit upon rooftops, fences and occasionally dive-bomb Melanie. They're testing the waters. Sizing up the situation. Doing pre-invasion recon.

Lydia and Annie do the same. Across several beautifully staged sequences, the duo ask probing questions and do their best to disguise their true intentions, thoughts and feelings. But Melanie sees through such reconnaissance. She senses veiled threats hidden beneath urbane posturing, especially when around Lydia. Significantly, a large portrait of Mitch's father occupies the heart of Mitch's family home. With Daddy gone, Mommy has become the guardian of all Desire. Mitch - a broad-shouldered, caricature of 1950s masculinity - is thus locked in an Oedipal drama without even knowing it. Hoping to claim all Satisfaction for herself, Mommy refuses to let her Perfect Little Son go.

And so the attacks begin. Thousands of birds flock into Mitch's home and proceed to throw a hissy fit. Better sequences occur later, when a local man's eyes are gouged out and when a mass of birds slowly descend upon a schoolyard climbing frame. Hitchcock films these sequences with a mixture of gentlemanly, up-market sophistication, and tawdry, low-brow sensationalism. Release this film today and it would feature giant ostriches with machine guns. Hitchcock, though, draws from a more refined toolbox; voyeuristic long-shots, curious camera crawls and slow boiling suspense. His film also contains no music, only Bernard Herrmann's orchestration of electronically enhanced bird sounds.

Midway in "Birds", our heroes seek shelter in a local diner. Here various characters pontificate as to the motivations of the birds. Is this the end of the world? The apocalypse? Have the birds gone mad? The sequence ends with a hallway full of local women staring at Melanie like a coven of witches. "She brought them here!" they yell.

In Sam Peckinpah's "Straw Dogs", an "effeminate" man barricades himself in a house and attempts to hold off a home invasion. For better or for worse, the film reflected the anxieties of the 1960s, in which "sexually emancipated" women and "intellectual males" tried to navigate and shake off various gender stereotypes. "Birds'" climax presents a kind of sexual inversion of "Straw Dogs'". It finds our heroes locked in a house whilst thousands of birds attempt to force their way in. Here Lydia becomes emblematic of "traditional" womanhood; a maternal, asexual, docile homemaker. Melanie's the modern interloper; a high flying, independent, big city sexpot who "hates her own mother" and "dances topless in fountains". The film then ends with Melanie being beaten, humiliated and tamed. She's reduced to a childlike state, now no longer threatening and now in explicit need of Lydia's motherly nurturing. Only then does Lydia finally accept Melanie. Only then do the birds withdraw.

Controlling mothers are everywhere in Hitchcock's filmography. They feature most prominently, though, in Hitchcock's "Mommy Trilogy", which consists of three successive, very Freudian films: "Psycho" (1960), "Birds" (1963) and "Marnie" (1964). In "Psycho", a son jealously kills the controlling, puritanical mother who conditioned him to feel guilty about his own sexual desires. In "Marnie", meanwhile, the daughter of a once promiscuous now puritanical mother learns to stop fearing both men and sexual desire. In these two films, traumatic childhood memories, as well as "represssive" attitudes toward sex, lead to neuroses and psychoses in the grown up son or daughter. And in both films, when something induces the momentary retrieval of a repressed memory, a neurotic or psychotic episode is triggered.

Melanie's trajectory in "Birds" presents an inversion of her trajectory in "Marnie" (also starring Tippi Hedren). She's a modern, confident, "sexually liberated" woman who is beaten into submission and essentially turned into Psycho's Norman Bates. The result is a supremely strange film: a FX heavy, crowd-pleasing, expressionistic, psychodrama-slasher-sex-comedy, directed like High Art and featuring killer birds.

8.9/10 – See "Black Narcissus", "The Beguiled" and "Three Women".

I like this film, especially the clever beginning. However, two unbelievable scenes stretch credulity a bit too far. The first is when Suzanne Pleshette is found dead in front of her house after pushing a completely unhurt little girl into the house. One would think that if she could get the little girl inside the house without a scratch then she could also manage to get herself inside.

Along the same vein is the infamous attic scene, which supposedly took four days for Hitchcock to shoot. He certainly didn't spend those four days trying to make the scene believable! Tippi Hedren blunders into an attic full of attacking birds. She gropes interminably for the doorknob but can only manage to collapse in front of the door. Come on! These are seagulls and crows! Turn the knob and go out the way you came in girl.

The ending scene and closing shot are great. The birds are most ominous when they are not attacking.

I don't think anyone was prepared in 1963 for the unexplained horror Hitchcock unleashed here (hell, I wasn't; and I first saw it 25 years later). Now, 50 years later, it's still absolutely unique and remains a stand-alone picture which doesn't cease to amaze me.

The tension Hitchcock slowly builds and the atmosphere of impending doom he creates are mesmerizing. This was probably the first true apocalyptic nightmare ever put on screen; a shocker, and the terror this film inspires is greatly enhanced by the fact that it refuses to give the viewer any answers. Nature just turns on humanity all of a sudden, and although it's just those adorable tiny creatures called "birds" that we see go amok, I was left with the impression that this might just be the start of something bigger, much much worse.

This was Hitchcock, the man who - next to Chaplin and Disney - probably had the biggest impact on the evolution of cinema from the twenties to the early sixties, at the peak of his creativity.

A terrifying work of beauty. My vote: 8 out of 10

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Favorite Low-Budget and B-Movies: http://www.imdb.com/list/ls054808375/

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Sadly this was the last good film from Alfred Hitchcock, it was downhill all the way from this – sadly because I always felt the last 5 he directed were all wasted opportunities and not inherently bad films. Although Frenzy was cheap and nasty and Family Plot was dull and flat. Hitch was still at the top of his game here, completely indifferent to the content of du Maurier's short story and telling us as he done so often in the past a cinema story instead with wonderful panache.

Ice cool blonde Hedren falls for chunky lawyer Taylor, visits him at his house by the sea bringing with her 2 love birds and also apparently bringing down all the local birds united anger. The birds sporadically violently attack the humans, no one knows why or how to stop them – but how could they when they didn't even know the difference between ravens and blackbirds. Plenty of iconic old fashioned shocks: the farmer in his pyjamas lying dead; the crows silently flocking on the climbing frame behind the awkwardly smoking Hedren; the chaos when the petrol station was attacked; Hedren being stabbed in the shower, sorry, bedroom by the waiting birds; so many others. The necessary Disney cartoonery and special effects were almost immediately dated, and also much corn and clunky melodrama are displayed, all of which will always be overlooked when a story is told so masterfully as this is. Hitch always wrapped his cleverness up with a sheen of simplicity and seemingly effortlessly played with his viewers' emotions. Nearly two hours go by and then comes (the end)…

Hitch would've enjoyed utilising the standard cgi cartoonery and camera technology available today (not to mention today's wonderful freedom to portray deviancy and bestiality as normal); thankfully what we have is a classic film, with faults, but watchable over and over again.

Before and since "The Birds", you've had all manner of creatures to make their impact in horror films. The brilliance of Alfred Hitchcock is that he doesn't go for the obvious - the great white shark, the rampaging gorilla, or the Jurassic dinosaur. What could be more welcome than a few songbirds to brighten up and add some cheer to an otherwise ordinary day? As the crows congregated in the schoolyard it seemed like they exuded evil in a strange way, foreshadowing an event outside the normal scheme of things. With all the slash and gore spectacle prevalent in horror films today, one has a keen sense as a viewer that nothing presented on screen is real. But take one look at the plucked out eyes of farmer Dan Fawcett slumped against the wall of his home, and you begin to wonder, wow! could something like that ever really happen?

Offsetting the grim spectacle of the bird attacks, I thought Hitchcock did a nicely nuanced job with some offbeat humor that might not seem obvious at first. Would a pair of caged lovebirds really respond to inertia the way the ones in Melanie's car did taking those curves on the road to Bodega Bay? I thought that was a neat touch. And how about shortly after the sparrow attack at the Daniels home, when the diner waitress orders baked potato with the fried chicken? Hitchcock's little way of a preemptive strike on the feathered set before things really get going.

One thing seemed kind of odd though. Recalling that sparrow attack down the chimney into the Daniels parlor, wasn't it strange that no one screamed? Not even a sound out of any of the people in the room, including little Cathy Brenner (Veronica Cartwright). That certainly wasn't played very realistically; I pictured myself in that room shouting out a few well chosen four letter words besides 'bird', I can tell you that.

As for the players, Tippi Hedren did a commendable job in virtually her very first screen role. There was something mysterious to her persona that might have been construed as to contributing to the bird attacks. That idea was voiced later in the story by the panicked mother who wanted to leave town as quickly as possible with her daughter. I couldn't really warm up to the idea of Veronica Cartwright and Rod Taylor portraying a brother and sister with the apparent age disparity, but that wound up working out OK.

The inconclusive finale left me feeling a little baffled since there was no real resolution to the problem with the birds back in Bodega Bay. It felt a little like the ending to the original "War Of The Worlds" (1953) where everything kind of worked out for the best, but with no sense of closure or comfort to it.

Before closing I have to throw out this bit of ornithological trivia, and I'm curious why Hitchcok didn't use it in the film. There was in fact a reference to a flock of crows in the picture, but the more accurate description would have been a 'murder of crows'. Seriously, you could look it up, the term came about because a group of crows is known to kill an already dying animal in order to feed. A whole bunch of them looks kind of spooky too!

Eric's Grade: B- 'The Birds' is a 1963 horror suspense film from famed director Alfred Hitchcock with a screenplay by Evan Hunter based on short story by Daphne du Maurier. Hitchcock had previously struck Oscar gold back in 1940 with an adaptation of du Marier's 'Rebecca'. 'The Birds' is only loosely based on the short story keeping essentially only the concept of unexplained bird attacks. During the film there was an actual bird attack in Capitola, CA which Hitchcock researched for the film as well. 'The Birds' stars Tippi Hedren, in her screen debut, as well as Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy and Suzanne Pleshette. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Special Effects and in 2016 was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. While it received mixed reviews upon its release it has gone on to be one of Hitchcock's more famous and noteworthy films.

In San Francisco a socialite named Melanie Daniels, played by Hedron, meets a lawyer named Mitch. They have a casual flirtation in a pet store discussing birds although it ends with Mitch taking a jab at Melanie's cavalier socialite persona. She follows him up to Bodega Bay, CA to make amends which leads to attraction and love. Also in Bodega Bay is a schoolteacher played Pleshette who dated Mitch at one time. Mitch is staying on the family farm with his austere mother, played by Jessica Tandy, and his young sister. After this somewhat banal melodrama some isolated incidents involving birds acting erratically and violently start occurring, but before long it starts happening more frequently and with greater ferocity. The number of birds swell until the entire town becomes terrorized by the strange occurrence of nature gone haywire.

While I believe suspense, to some degree, can be a timeless quality horror is a genre that has progressed over time with higher stakes, better special effects, more suspense and, of course, a plethora of gore. Back in the early 60's gore wasn't much of an option so suspense had to rule the genre. Hitchcock does excel in finding pervasive horror in the banal. Birds seem to be an unknowable, unsympathetic creature yet they are natural and, for the most part harmless to humans. So what happens when we take a common thing that we take for granted in daily life and turn that thing on an unsuspecting populace. 'The Birds' explores that mode of hopeless fear as it is scarier when something that should be benign instead becomes a source of terror. It really increases the characters' feelings of confusion and helplessness in the face of something inexplicable. It also goes essentially unresolved. There are no answers to be had, but only escape to be sought. 'The Birds' feel too tame even for the era although it does explore an interesting method of suspense. This comes three years after 'Psycho' which still resonates to this day. 'The Birds' also dwells too long on inconsequential melodrama before getting to the meat of the story perhaps because it realizes it is actually quite thin on plot. It is certainly interesting although I question its status as a film classic.

Some films are so well made that watching them unfold sequence by sequence creates the feeling of surrender to a higher force. Hitchcock, no stranger to spellbinding his audience, was known for bringing a sense of intense masochism into the viewer's eyes. In THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH the Albert Hall sequence is a perfect crescendo of images and music in which Jo McKenna sees a man who is the key to her son's safety prepare to commit a crime with deadly slowness. In PSYCHO, Marion Crane takes a fatal shower and gets a vicious visitor. In VERTIGO, Scotty and Judy begin a dizzying affair which itself is as obsessive as narcotic and culminates high above the bell tower, filled with revelations upon revelations.

THE BIRDS is by far one of Hitchcock's most deadly incursions into cinematic masochism. In itself, it's a masterpiece of misdirection. Hitchcock has no wrong man in his story, no chase sequences (or at least, none that involve Cary Grant and some Bad Guys), and no double-crosses. All he presents here is Tippi Hedren's arrival to the small town of Bodega Bay, a series of Meet Cutes between her and Rod Taylor, what could pass as romantic suspense, and the most impressive sweeping of the rug right out from under the audience's feet at precisely halfway through the movie when the plot makes a left turn into uncharted territory. Who else can lay claim to that feat? Hitchcock, in revealing the black petals of his deadly flower revealing themselves, opening up, and swallowing the viewer whole at this precise mark is one of the un-topped achievements in cinema history.

And so begins a sequence of events that proceed at the vertiginous crescendo of domino's falling. We've seen the birds amass and attack in increasing ferocity. We've seen the damage they've done to the little city. Hitchcock, of course, has one better on the viewers during the film's overpowering climax: making their presence oppressive and omniscient through the use of sound imitating their shrieks until it becomes deafening and everyone is twisting and turning in revulsion among the corners of the house in reaction not only to their fury but to what they might imagine as their horrible deaths. Hitchcock never once gives an emotional release, and then he outdoes himself in using the most hackneyed excuse for a plot device: Melanie ascending the stairs because she heard a rustling noise, the quintessential "Don't go there," which is the oldest trick in the book. Because we know what lies on the other side of the door....

The stroboscopic effect of the last attack is petrifying as it is unflinching. Melanie, waving the flashlight in a weak signal for help, being slammed against the door, as Mitch tries to get inside but finds he cannot. As Melanie begins slumping and surrenders to the birds' attack, she has an odd mixture of horror and pleasure. We, of course, can't do anything but watch and watch and watch.

Hitchcock had always been attracted to the theme of rape. Because his (professional) relationship with Tippi Hedren was brittle at best, this sequence, somehow out of place and character, seems more in tune with his love-hate attitude towards blonde women and his need for their total submission. Beginning with the emotional rape Jo McKenna suffers with the disappearance of her son, the psychological stripping of Madeleine's identity in VERTIGO, Marion's violent death at the Bates Motel in PSYCHO in and culminating in the barbaric rape sequence of FRENZY, he possessed a desire to destroy that which he loved or desired the most.

I notice how he makes Rod Taylor's character suddenly incapable of saving Melanie right at the end (which heightens the viewers agony -- they want, they need her to survive the birds' attack). It's almost as if he, the Director as Ringmaster, were pushing the Heroine right to the edge of the abyss for one last moment before bringing her back to the (relative) safety of family. Even then, with the vague ending, Hitchcock seems to sort of wink at the audience and tell them that it's still not over -- and this is the sort of thing only a sadistic imp of a personality would do. THE BIRDS is his obsessions at its most explicit (as they were implicit in VERTIGO) and is the kind of cinematic experience that can always be rediscovered even when its tricks become evident. It's been considered Hitchcock's last masterpiece before returning to almost full form for FRENZY, and in many ways, it is the setup for the more graphic, cruel violence of the latter film.

Before I say anything, I must say that I don't watch a lot of older movies (by older,, I mean before the early 70s or so). I have absolutely nothing against them,, just not always my thing. I've seen Psycho,, so I figured I should give another classic Hitchcock movie a try.

Melanie is a San Francisco socialite who meets Mitch in a chance encounter. She is both annoyed and smitten with him. Thru her family's connections, she discovers who he is, and where he travels to on the weekend. She asks around about him and finds out he spends weekends with his mother and younger sister in their family home. Rather than thinking of her as a stalker, Mitch is very happy to see Melanie there,, and they begin a playful courtship.

As Melanie spends time with Mitch and gets to know his mother and sister,, strange occurrences are happening with the local birds. Melanie gets attacked by a seagull. A murder of crows attacks school children. Birds even kill a man in his home. What could be the cause of this?!?

Personally, I wouldn't even call this a horror film. I would say it's a suspense film (there's a difference, imo).

I know this movie is often described as a "masterpiece" and for the life of me, I don't understand why.

First of all: the acting is completely wooden from virtually everyone in the movie. It could be that the actors could find no motivation for their characters.

Whatever is supposed to be happening or building between the characters in the first half of the movie seems to lead to absolutely nothing int he movie. It's vague back story for the sake of back story. If Hitchcock was trying to have us care about the characters, he failed miserably.

Second, and perhaps most important: what do the birds have to do with any of this vapid soap opera that is occurring on the ground? Nothing. Nothing at all. And that would be fine, if somehow the bird frenzy created some sort of empathy in the viewer or brought about a change or revelation in the characters. But no, I found myself not caring if the whole town got eked to death. The characters all come across as shallow, self-centered, bitter people.

I know I might get the wrath of many fans of this movie. But, sorry, this movie fails on so many levels.