31 Days of Halloween Day 7: The Birds (1963)
October 10th 2010 18:52
Now, you didn't think I'd blog about watching Hallowe'en movies for a month and not include a Hitchcock film, would you? Aside from his being a horror stalwart, I also need to give a shout-out to my British background, so this is a great way to kill two birds with one stone.
FYI: the above pun was absolutely not intended. I swear.
Set in San Francisco, The Birds begins with a young, well-to-do woman sauntering into a pet shop (almost running into Alfie walking out with his puppies!) to pick up some - what else? - birds. She's fashionably late, and won't even wait for the adorably meek harangued clerk to phone for an update regarding their delivery, and insists that they be delivered to her home instead. A talk, dark, handsome man spots her, and, operating under the assumption that she works there, draws a long sales pitch out of her regarding an enquiry for love birds for his pre-teen sister ("not too demonstrative...but not too aloof, either"). The rich bint keeps up the charade admirably, despite mistaking canaries for love birds and indicating that moulting season is illustrated by a bird's "hang-dog expression", but crumbles into embarrassment when the canary she tries to handle escapes its cage.
Rescuing it with his hat (which magically seems to transform it into an easy-to-catch prop bird), he informs the woman that he knows who she is - Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren, mother of this unfortunate mess), and is well aware of her predilection for pranks resulting in criminal vandalism, and "thought [she] might like to see what it's like to be on the other end of a gag". When she calls him a "louse", he smiles and agrees.
Not to be outdone, she calls up Daddy's newspaper and sweet-talks her brother into violating privacy laws (did they exist back then?) by looking up the licence plate of said louse. It turns out it belongs to Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) who lives in town. Purchasing the lovebirds, she drops by his apartment, but is told by his neighbour that he spends weekends in Bodega Bay, and that it's "1.5 hours by freeway, 2 hours on the coastal highway".
Naturally, she takes the coastal highway, which affords us some beautiful crane shots of the scenery, but also an insight into Melanie's brattish ways, as speeding and screeching down the empty, crooked, coastal highway is probably better suited to a socialite who spent the summer jumping naked into fountains in Rome than cruising in an orderly fashion down a predictable freeway.
After using her charm to worm out of the local postman the exact details of Mitch's home, his living situation, and the address of his sister's school teacher (to whom she goes to verify his little sister's name), she charters a tugboat and zooms across the lake. Her oversized mink fur coat and expensive-looking tweed suit set surprisingly bone-dry, she sneaks into Mitch's house, leaves the lovebirds with a note, and buggers off. Mitch spots her from a distance, and, upon catching up with her at the docks, witnesses a gull swoop down and give her a much-deserved kick in the face.
Visibly shaken, she decides to stay in town and spends some time getting to know Mitch's mother Lydia (Jessica Tandy) and younger sister Cathy (Veronica Cartwright). She rents a room from Annie (Suzanne Plechette), who happens to be Mitch's ex, and is only slightly bitter, but not at all jealous and a fairly warm character.
Unlike a lot of horror movies, the character build-up in this is both succinct and compelling. There is a great balance of showing versus telling (through dialogue, including one-sided phone calls), and the character's backgrounds are seamlessly illustrated in some very natural dialogue, such as Mitch's profession as a lawyer being casually introduced during a scene in which a local cafe owner double-checks that Melanie's run-in with the seagull was not something for which he could be sued. The rest of the non-expository dialogue is very witty, and chock-full of circular references, call-backs to previous jokes, and snappy little comebacks. There's some cracking dialogue in one of the cafe scenes when an old ornithologist (the preclusion to the crazy cat lady) tries to educate people on the beauty of birds versus the evils of man, but gets interrupted by an order for fried chicken.
Melanie's attack appears at first to be an isolated incident, and so does the dead gull that slams into Annie's front door, but soon Lydia finds an old neighbor (who couldn't get his chickens to eat) slumped on his bedroom floor with his eyes gouged out, and suddenly all bets are off.
The attacks get progressively worse, with Hitchcock not afraid to set live birds on groups of small, terrified children (this would probably not happen if Gus Van Sant remade this), with some rather grisly results. Somehow the script finds time to develop each of the principal characters as defined within the film's events, and without suffering the pace to lag at all. There are some stunning action sequences, including a scene in which large crows appear, one by one, on a school climbing frame while Melanie waits for the children inside to finish their choral exercises. Turning around,she sees that it's completely full of them. Think of how much bird shit there would be. It'd be worse than Chichester.
The movie has absolutely no score, and tension is built up using the sounds of the birds themselves - shrieks echo high-pitched crescendos, and the flapping of their wings en masse are reminiscent of battle weaponry and ominous drum tracks. The lack of music also grounds us in the middle of the action, as if we were watching a horrifying nature documentary gone wrong.
Indeed, the birds are running the show - attacking at will, unable to be caught, restrained (unlike the birds in the pet shop) or destroyed. They launch calculated waves of attacks, even based on their limitations - during one scene, they wait until a cafe patron leaves to fill up his car, then peck him into subconsciousness, causing him to drop the petrol hose. When a passer-by stops to have a cigarette, the match he drops sets fire to an entire trail of spilled gasoline, blocking one of the main roads off entirely. It seems, then, that the birds not only orchestrate the score, but also write the plot and choreograph the set-pieces, and they do so without any explanation whatsoever.
There are theories for the birds' behaviour, such as the city caged lovebirds sparking fits of anger among the resident gull-rats, but the reasons for the attacks, or how sudden they are are never stated. And, much like deranged serial killers in slasher movies, it's a hell of a lot more terrifying when there is no reason for the carnage (and no discernible way to stop it).
Aside from Psycho, I had not been very well-versed in Hitchcock's work, and this marks the first of his movies that I had seen with a critical eye. Having watched it, I can say that there really isn't much about which to be (negatively) critical; the man is an absolute genius.
FYI: the above pun was absolutely not intended. I swear.
Set in San Francisco, The Birds begins with a young, well-to-do woman sauntering into a pet shop (almost running into Alfie walking out with his puppies!) to pick up some - what else? - birds. She's fashionably late, and won't even wait for the adorably meek harangued clerk to phone for an update regarding their delivery, and insists that they be delivered to her home instead. A talk, dark, handsome man spots her, and, operating under the assumption that she works there, draws a long sales pitch out of her regarding an enquiry for love birds for his pre-teen sister ("not too demonstrative...but not too aloof, either"). The rich bint keeps up the charade admirably, despite mistaking canaries for love birds and indicating that moulting season is illustrated by a bird's "hang-dog expression", but crumbles into embarrassment when the canary she tries to handle escapes its cage.
Rescuing it with his hat (which magically seems to transform it into an easy-to-catch prop bird), he informs the woman that he knows who she is - Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren, mother of this unfortunate mess), and is well aware of her predilection for pranks resulting in criminal vandalism, and "thought [she] might like to see what it's like to be on the other end of a gag". When she calls him a "louse", he smiles and agrees.
Not to be outdone, she calls up Daddy's newspaper and sweet-talks her brother into violating privacy laws (did they exist back then?) by looking up the licence plate of said louse. It turns out it belongs to Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) who lives in town. Purchasing the lovebirds, she drops by his apartment, but is told by his neighbour that he spends weekends in Bodega Bay, and that it's "1.5 hours by freeway, 2 hours on the coastal highway".
Naturally, she takes the coastal highway, which affords us some beautiful crane shots of the scenery, but also an insight into Melanie's brattish ways, as speeding and screeching down the empty, crooked, coastal highway is probably better suited to a socialite who spent the summer jumping naked into fountains in Rome than cruising in an orderly fashion down a predictable freeway.
After using her charm to worm out of the local postman the exact details of Mitch's home, his living situation, and the address of his sister's school teacher (to whom she goes to verify his little sister's name), she charters a tugboat and zooms across the lake. Her oversized mink fur coat and expensive-looking tweed suit set surprisingly bone-dry, she sneaks into Mitch's house, leaves the lovebirds with a note, and buggers off. Mitch spots her from a distance, and, upon catching up with her at the docks, witnesses a gull swoop down and give her a much-deserved kick in the face.
Visibly shaken, she decides to stay in town and spends some time getting to know Mitch's mother Lydia (Jessica Tandy) and younger sister Cathy (Veronica Cartwright). She rents a room from Annie (Suzanne Plechette), who happens to be Mitch's ex, and is only slightly bitter, but not at all jealous and a fairly warm character.
Unlike a lot of horror movies, the character build-up in this is both succinct and compelling. There is a great balance of showing versus telling (through dialogue, including one-sided phone calls), and the character's backgrounds are seamlessly illustrated in some very natural dialogue, such as Mitch's profession as a lawyer being casually introduced during a scene in which a local cafe owner double-checks that Melanie's run-in with the seagull was not something for which he could be sued. The rest of the non-expository dialogue is very witty, and chock-full of circular references, call-backs to previous jokes, and snappy little comebacks. There's some cracking dialogue in one of the cafe scenes when an old ornithologist (the preclusion to the crazy cat lady) tries to educate people on the beauty of birds versus the evils of man, but gets interrupted by an order for fried chicken.
Melanie's attack appears at first to be an isolated incident, and so does the dead gull that slams into Annie's front door, but soon Lydia finds an old neighbor (who couldn't get his chickens to eat) slumped on his bedroom floor with his eyes gouged out, and suddenly all bets are off.
The attacks get progressively worse, with Hitchcock not afraid to set live birds on groups of small, terrified children (this would probably not happen if Gus Van Sant remade this), with some rather grisly results. Somehow the script finds time to develop each of the principal characters as defined within the film's events, and without suffering the pace to lag at all. There are some stunning action sequences, including a scene in which large crows appear, one by one, on a school climbing frame while Melanie waits for the children inside to finish their choral exercises. Turning around,she sees that it's completely full of them. Think of how much bird shit there would be. It'd be worse than Chichester.
The movie has absolutely no score, and tension is built up using the sounds of the birds themselves - shrieks echo high-pitched crescendos, and the flapping of their wings en masse are reminiscent of battle weaponry and ominous drum tracks. The lack of music also grounds us in the middle of the action, as if we were watching a horrifying nature documentary gone wrong.
Indeed, the birds are running the show - attacking at will, unable to be caught, restrained (unlike the birds in the pet shop) or destroyed. They launch calculated waves of attacks, even based on their limitations - during one scene, they wait until a cafe patron leaves to fill up his car, then peck him into subconsciousness, causing him to drop the petrol hose. When a passer-by stops to have a cigarette, the match he drops sets fire to an entire trail of spilled gasoline, blocking one of the main roads off entirely. It seems, then, that the birds not only orchestrate the score, but also write the plot and choreograph the set-pieces, and they do so without any explanation whatsoever.
There are theories for the birds' behaviour, such as the city caged lovebirds sparking fits of anger among the resident gull-rats, but the reasons for the attacks, or how sudden they are are never stated. And, much like deranged serial killers in slasher movies, it's a hell of a lot more terrifying when there is no reason for the carnage (and no discernible way to stop it).
Aside from Psycho, I had not been very well-versed in Hitchcock's work, and this marks the first of his movies that I had seen with a critical eye. Having watched it, I can say that there really isn't much about which to be (negatively) critical; the man is an absolute genius.
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Comment by Bryn
Horrorphile
I've only ever seen The Birds once, many, many years ago. I didn't remember it not having a score. Curious indeed!
The scene with the crows on the jungle-gym is a scene that sticks out indeed. I remember being impressed by the special effects of the birds, but I'm curious how the whole movie stacks up nearly forty years down the track. It's not my favourite Hitchcock by a long shot, but still a well-made movie.
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