Wife and I watched “The Birds” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963) last night and I must admit it was much better than my memory led me to believe… probably a maturity thing as the last time I watched it I was 10 or so and didn’t care about the people - I just wanted to see birds attack and did not want to see the icky romance scenes.
But I had some questions/thoughts and wanted to run them by the peeps here at the Dope, see what you thought. Sure I can look some of this up on Google, but that’s no fun.
Tippi Hedren had one sexy voice. Whatever happened to her?
I decided upon seeing her that the schoolteacher was a closet lesbian - no reason, really, except for the way her eyes roamed up and down Hedren’s body and I thought that adding some subtext would make the movie more enjoyable. Anybody else get this idea? (I knew the film would have her and Mitchell as ex-lovers, but so what? I can add to the movie what I wish! )
Edith Head was given a title card of her own for “Ms. Hedren’s wardrobe.” Hell, the lady only wore two outfits the entire film! Must have been an easy gig.
My wife was very disappointed in the ending, when the military didn’t show up with a battalion of flamethrowers.
Hitchcock likes his weird-assed “meet cutes”, doesn’t he? First Tippi acts like she’s a bird store employee to lead Mitchell on*, then she stalks the guy up to his house, breaks into it, and leaves two lovebirds for Mitchell’s sister, Cathy. Reminds me of all those girlfriends I got by getting caught while breaking into their dorm rooms and sniffing their panties. (NOT)
Lydia, Mitchell’s mom, looked as if she could be Tippi’s mother as well, especially when they first met and they had the same hairstyle. I was thinking “man, this isn’t going to be some bizarre incest-tinged love story like Star Wars is it?”
Hedren makes it to Bodega Bay. First night, she stays at the schoolteachers house, showing her the nightie she bought, while schoolteacher looks on appreciatively (heh? HEH? What I tell ya? ). Next night, she ends up staying at Mitchell’s house, invited to stay in an empty bedroom. I tell Laura (my wife, of course) “She and Mitchell are going to end up banging.” “No way that’s going to happen.” Cut to the next day where, let’s just say they are a LOT more demonstrative in their display of physical closeness. Called it!
Listening to the radio and finding out that these bird attacks were a localized event would have had me in the car headed San Francisco way in about 6.3 nanoseconds. However, our intrepid heroes decide to spend the night because… well, just because. Oh, well, I guess you can’t have horror movies if the victims did the rational thing at all times.
So Tippi goes to the school and the kids spend 5-10 minutes singing this stupid ditty… no wonder the American workers were unable to meet the Japanese challenge 15 years later if their schooldays were spent memorizing idiocies.
*10. Speaking of, whatever happened to that lawsuit re: the plate glass window? Isn’t it a breach of ethics for the opposing attorney (I assume) to be making the two-backed beast with the person his client is suing?
We saw this a couple of months ago at a Charity Event for the Nebraska Kidney Foundation with Tippi Hedron as the guest speaker. I had forgotten how much better this is on the big screen. Ms. Hedron gave a good talk about the making of the film.
She also made Hitchcock’s “Marnie” the year after “The Birds”, then sort of disappeared into TV appearances. I’ll never forgive her for giving birth to Melanie Griffith, however.
I was about ten the first time I saw it on TV and I was used to cheesy monster/disaster movies (Them!, Beginning of the End, Godzilla etc.), so I too was absolutely shocked when THE END credits suddenly appeared as they’re driving away. I also was like, “What?! When is the army coming to wipe them out?!” Of course watching it now it’s a perfect ending to a thriller, there was no reason why the birds starting attacking so there was no need (or way) to have a definitive conclusion.
Melanie Griffith has given interviews about growing up on the set of these movies, and she says that Hitch was a bit of a perv…
And then Tippi’s character turns her head and sees the playground equipment completely covered in birds - that has to be the most frightening scene in the film.
Just like Fargo is considered a dark comedy, that’s the way I’m viewing The Birds now. There’s enough strangeness in the movie that makes it absurd, like the breaking into the house, the solo trip across the bay, the race against the pickup back to the town, the one green suit worn the entire movie, the initial impersonation of a saleslady, the “Risselty-Rosselty” song, the way the lovebirds lean into the turn during the sports car ride. Then both movies end the same way, very quietly with people caring and taking care of each other but with an uncertain future.
Annie the schoolteacher was Suzanne Pleshette who, less than 10 years later, was playing arguably the sexiest wife ever in a TV sitcom (and certainly the first one to inspire the comment “What the hell does she see in HIM?”)
Try reading the original story it’s based on. It’s really dark and depressing. Seriously. If you ever can’t decide whether or not to commit suicide, and you want to talk yourself into it, read this story. It’s up there with The Haunting of Hill House as one of the most disturbing things I have ever read. That wasn’t about a grisly, true crime, anyway.
The ending of the movie is all sparkles and s’mores compared to the story. (Albeit, if you’ve read the story, you think maybe the movie isn’t really over, if you get my meaning. Not with a bang, but with a tweet.)
It’s written by the same person who wrote Rebecca. Hitchcock used her work at least three times that I can think of off-hand.
It occurred to me that unless the crows and gulls are eating human flesh, they’re going to starve to death if they spend all their time being berserkers instead of looking for food.
Regarding your #1, over 30 years ago Tippi Hedrin founded and still helps run a Sanctuary for big cats (lions, tigers, etc.) that can’t be released back into the wild called Shambala Preserve. She’s a great lady.
That’s a good way to look at it. I’m not the biggest Hitchcock fan, but I enjoyed this one far more than I expected to. It was helped by the fact that I remembered so little of it so it was a constant surprise (at least as far as the characters were concerned.)
I think she was also somewhat disillusioned with Hollywood as a result of her experiences with Hitchcock. He couldn’t have been the only director who wanted to get in her pants.
(Spoilers for the story ahead. If you don’t wan’t to be spoiled, read the above link - it’s not too long.
OK, you’ve been warned. )
I read the story and, 'cause I’m geeky this way, it took far more suspension of disbelief for me to accept the premise (and the outcome) of the short story than it did for the movie. In the movie, the attacks are a localized event that resulted in about 5 or so human deaths and dozens and dozens of dead birds. In the story, it’s a global event that causes the collapse of civilization almost overnight.
Maybe it’s me, but I think that if all the birds in the world decided to lay waste to human civilization we would end up with about 40,000 dead people and a billion+ dead birds. In the story it’s implied that well over 100 birds died merely to get at the farmer and his family (the first attack alone ended with 50 dead small birds)… with ratios like that, I’m still puzzling out the collapse of civilization w/in a day or three that occurred in the story… and that’s before mankind breaks out the flamethrowers, cranks up the DDT factories, uses nets to capture birds by the hundreds, hands out shotguns to citizens, etc.
I mean, birds are fragile things. They aren’t sturdy animals that can take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’, they have hollow bones, they must eat a lot compared to their body weight, and they aren’t strong. A rational person would be more concerned with the mites and diseases a bird would be carrying than the bird itself.
So, yeah, dark and depressing… but this is one of those times where I think the movie was an improvement over the source material (another one being the film Jaws, in case anybody is wondering.)
I’d guess that Hitchcock didn’t want any more of ending to make it seem like a localized event that could happen again anywhere. The movie is a lot like alien invasion movies but it’s just birds, something we all see everyday. The movie caused quite a stir at the time, good marketing and the posters I recall had the birds attacking a blonde woman (Hedren?). Here’s one, there’s a note from Hitchcock:
Following the success of Psycho that alone would prime the audience to be waiting for a horrific scene at every moment. But The Birds is actually a much tamer movie.
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