Hitchcock Review: The Birds

The Birds starring Tippi Hedren is one of those movies that everybody knows, but I'm not sure if everyone has actually seen it.

From 1963, this movie has been called one of the horror classics, even though I don't think it is one of Hitch's best. Don't get me wrong, it is superbly done, especially for its time period and special effects. Watching a piece on it a while back, Tippi said that the attic scene where she is attacked by birds took three days to film with the crew constantly just throwing birds at her. With what Yoda can do on the screen now, this would probably be a cgi-created scene now. Yet the Hitchcock movie effects lend a touch of realism to it.

I watched this movie a week or so ago, and was going to review it but first wanted to mull it over in my head. I didn't like it. It was scary and suspenseful in that a sitting flock of birds made you cringe. That was great stuff. You never knew when they would come, the ultimate in suspense.

The character development was weird. Hedren is basically a stalker as she follows this man 60 miles north just to prove her point. The man's own family situation was weird and that other girl that moves to be near him was sad. But maybe that was what it was saying about real life. Sometimes it is just sad the mistakes and decisions we make, even though we think they are the right ones.

You are almost halfway into the movie when this bird thing starts. Random attacks first plague the little hamlet, getting worse in intensity as the movie goes. Conjecture about the birds taking over the earth by their sheer numbers is monster-movie banter at its best. When the attacks come, the viewer forgets completely about the lives of these characters.

Maybe that was the point. Maybe Hitch wanted to portray regular everyday stupid life and then shock us with an immense horror of unending implications. If these seemingly innocuous birds did decide to conquer, would our pathethic existence seem worth saving?

The movie is well worth seeing, even if just for its historical significance to the cinema, and well worth talking about and engaging about further. I want to learn more about what others see in the movie. This may b e one of those movies, like Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey that, come on, is just crap by yourself, but talking about it with others is what makes it fascinating. Go see it and come back and tell me...