The Birds

The Birds (1963)

Runtime: 119 minutes

Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock

Starring: Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren, Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleschette, Veronica Cartwright

From: Universal

I have been lucky to have seen a few Hitchcock movies on the big screen, this being one of them. Me seeing that was a long time ago so I did not remember much; kid Veronica Cartwright as Rod Taylor's much younger sister is an example of that. So was how awful the Melanie Daniels character-played by Tippi Hedren-was!

The first 50 minutes or so were kind of rough at first, before I came up with my own backstory and things suddenly became more satisfactory for me. Melanie Daniels is a flighty socialite who I really did not care for, and not just because I don't care for socialites in general. She constantly (and badly) lied to Rod Taylor's character-who was a successful lawyer-she acts like a stalker in tracking him down, she craps on the bucolic town of Bodega Bay, California where he visits each weekend AND is where his young teen sister and mom live... she even does dumb impulsive crap like destroy public property and jump naked into European fountains! It was easy for me to hate such a character.

I apologize if I am spoiling anything for those that haven't watched this before, but the movie only speculates on the cause for birds suddenly attacking humans in Bodega Bay. The best scene is in a restaurant/bar where various characters discuss the happenings... an ornithologist says “it's impossible”, another states “it's the end of the world”, and a guy proclaims “They are getting revenge on humans”. A mother of two goes with the Occam's Razor method and determines that since these attacks only apparently started once Daniels comes to Bodega Bay, she must be the cause. Thinking about it, I have to agree.

Personally, it isn't hard to imagine someone that awful being some sort of succubus either doing this on purpose or having some sort of evil follow her and lay waste to the town due to her being horny for a handsome man such as early 60's Rod Taylor and that love not being requited, at least at first. It being on purpose and the birds attacking kids is awful, but so is her being terrible to a degree that dark demonic forces follow her that she can't control and doesn't even know is doing her bidding; in either case, it does drive her and her love interest closer together...

But I want to actually praise the film; while my rating is in part due to my own backstory, it is legitimately great with the bird attacks, and how suspense is built up for said attacks; the scene at school w/ the jungle gym is the prime example I'll use there. I can understand why some would complain about the matte effects used in those moments but it was fine with me and it is better than CGI... or whatever it was that was used for Birdemic. The fact that there's no score was a decision which was fitting here; just hearing the bird screeches when they go after people is pretty chilling.


While this isn't my favorite Hitch, I can still give this a nice rating due to it being better than what you'd expect from what sounds like a B movie plot or one of those “nature gone amok” 70's pictures.