I’ll admit right off the bat that I’m not a huge Hitchcock fan. I don’t dislike his films, they just seem clunky and over-rated. I just I just don’t understand his film-making style. Anyway, my question is about his film The Birds.
My wife and I watched it the other night. The one thing that jumped out at me was the huge age gap between Mitch and Cathy (he being 21 years older, if my math is correct). Why have that? It was a little jarring and took me out of the movie a bit. I kept trying to work out in my mind how it came about, especially since the dad was dead.
Googling, I expected there to be lots of info about it online but I found very little actually.
Most of it handwaving away the gap. Explaining situations that they have personally heard of etc. I’m not saying I can’t envision or comprehend an unusual situation in which a 21 year gap occurs in siblings, but why include it in a movie if it doesn’t bear on the plot? It was just weird to me.
It was certainly a lot more common in the early -mid 20th century, and earlier. My mom (born during WWII) was the youngest of 4, and was 20 years younger than her oldest sibling. She was an aunt at 4.
It’s fairly clear that she was a surprise baby. But at that time, there were way fewer options for preventing that. Families were bigger, and there could be a lot more spread in ages.
So a 21-year age gap between siblings might be at the high end, but on the whole it was, perhaps, unremarkable.
Some directors, like Tim Burton, have a cadre of supporting actors they like to use in their films. It could be Hitchcock wanted those two particular actors and thought their age differences wouldn’t be that big an issue. You know, because birds are killing everybody.
I’ve seen The Birds so many times, nothing in it is jarring to me anymore, but I absolutely felt the same was as the OP the first time I saw. More than that, Jessica Tandy seemed way past child bearing years. Didn’t spoil the experience for me but it is noticable.
I agree that Hitchcock is overrated. His movies are definitely clunky – exactly the word I’d have chosen. I have a bit of a fondness for The Birds just because I love Bodega Bay. I had my picture taken in front of the schoolhouse and was bummed that my bf wouldn’t let me pose draped on the fence like a victim. Harrumph.
Rope was an especially bad movie for me, because it focused so much on the gimmick that the story, acting, and pretty much everything else was just an afterthought.
Not unusual in the movies and less so in movies in that time period. I think Cary Grant was something like 25 years older than Audrey Hepburn in 1963’s Charade. In the movies leading men have longer careers in romantic roles than leading women and this is what results.
Yes, and he was very selfconscious about it. I’ve read that he felt a romantic relationship angle to the story was unseemly and that aspect of the story was changed.
I remember that being mentioned in a documentary on his life. But one year later he was cast in Father Goose with Leslie Caron who was 27 years younger than him, and they end up married in the film. It wasn’t unusual at the time.
My mother was the youngest of 8 kids and 21 years younger than her oldest sibling. It wasn’t all that unusual back then. Especially not for families that were interrupted by WW-II, with the early kid(s) pre-war and the later kid(s) post-war. Often with a different father for the obvious reason.
I don’t find Hitchcock movies any “clunkier” (great word) than any other drama of that period. The pacing is glacial by modern standards, but he’s unremarkable in that.
In most drama of that era the actors had to bludgeon the story into the audience. Nowadays the story slides in a lot easier. Hitchcock’s big schtick was the slow reveal, where we figure out what’s going on just a little bit faster than the characters do. So we know to scream “Don’t open that door!” before they open it. Add his slow relentless wall-to-wall tension building to an already culturally slow pace of exposition and it can feel like paint drying to a modern audience with the attention span of Squirrel!.
According to Turner Classic Movies, Grant wanted Hepburn to appear in Father Goose but she was busy with My Fair Lady so couldn’t do it. Caron was chosen as a similar style actress.
I confess I enjoy Father Goose and watch it on my Tivo whenever I can’t find anything else. “Kess ka say Warts?”
I am easily amused…
Yeah, the age thing in “The Birds” always seemed a little odd to me, but not if you look at the actual ages of the actors when the film was made. Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren were 33. Jessica Tandy was 54. Veronica Cartwright was 14. Jessica would have borne Veronica when she was 40, and Rod was 19. (If you’re counting, Jessica would have borne Rod when she was 21.) 40 is a late pregnancy but not unusual. My mother was 40 when I was born, and my oldest brother is 12 years older than me.
I don’t know what the ages of the characters were supposed to be, so I’m only going on their real ages. If Hitch had used a slightly older actress to play the daughter, high school age perhaps, it may have been more believable, but Veronica Cartwright was very good in the part and that’s what mattered.
Yeah, as I stated in the OP, I’m debating that it could happen but usually odd things are put in movies for a reason. To have it in there for no reason just seems odd, to me at least.
We had sort of a mini-marathon of Hitchcock movies last weekend. You want to see clunky, check out Marnie. Almost unwatchable, for me. And yet, some consider it a masterpiece. That’s what I meant by “not understanding his film making”. One review starts: “Marnie is technically brilliant, the suspense shots are some of Hitchcock’s best.”…
