The Birds (1963)
The Milwaukee Film Festival’s Cinema Hooligante program (Oct. 17-31 at various locations) leans toward horror but encompasses the bizarre and includes filmmakers from David Lynch (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me) to Milwaukee favorites Mark Borchardt (Coven) and Tate Bunker (The Field). It includes at least one classic, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), easily accessible at home but impossible to fully appreciate unless seen on a big screen.
The Birds is one-part screwball comedy, one-part horror show and one part undefinable. It can’t be slotted into any genre or easily described as anything other than an enigmatic masterpiece, Hitchcock’s last great film.
Working with screenwriter Evan Hunter, Hitchcock adapted The Birds from a novella by Daphne du Maurier. The English author, also the source for Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) and Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), was probably inspired by Welsh occultist Arthur Machen. In Machen’s novella, The Terror (1917), the animals of Great Britain viciously turn on humankind in a series of attacks separated by interludes of normalcy. Machen hinted that the animals might have been infected by the carnage of World War I. Mass murder as a species-jumping virus? However, du Maurier and Hitchcock confined themselves to winged creatures and hinted at nothing. The Birds’ open-ended lack of resolution is among its strengths. It feels timeless for refusing to offer a timely explanation.
Although in some ways unique among Hitchcock’s films, The Birds shares in the director’s persistent fascination with unexpected occurrences and encounters that tear people from their normal, complacent lives. The events of The Birds are unanticipated yet foreshadowed. The film opens as Melanie (Tippi Hedren) glances at a swarm of birds darkening a patch of San Francisco sky. She pays no heed to that first omen—and there will be others—before strolling into a pet shop full of caged birds.
Mitch (Rod Taylor) is also looking for birds, a British pun Hitchcock surely recognized. He addresses Melanie, the haute-couture scion of a publishing empire, pretending to think that she’s a shop clerk. Melanie mischievously plays along, even though she knows nothing of birds. Mitch is a lawyer who dislikes her from a court case she barely remembers in a scene playing out like a 1930s screwball comedy. And as sparks fly, attraction pulls harder than repulsion. Melanie makes the next move. She purchases a pair of lovebirds as a gift for Mitch’s 11-year-old sister and drives north from San Francisco along the winding coast road to rustic Bodega Bay. The lawyer makes his home there with sister Cathy (Veronica Cartwright) and mother Lydia (Jessica Tandy). That home will soon be pecked to pieces by birds.
The special effects remain more disturbing than any software-spun shape-shifting monster. Hitchcock used trained crows, supplemented by a few mechanical ones, and filled the sky with birds through a process of photographing the background and foreground at different times. Arising from the uncanny silence of Bodega Bay is the shriek and squall, the cawing and cackling of thousands of avian predators. There is no conventional music—no Hollywood orchestra telling us to be terrified. Composer Bernard Herrmann collaborated on the “sound production,” enhancing bird calls with electronics. In one of several unforgettable scenes, Melanie, Mitch and his family are barricaded inside the house as birds furiously tear at the walls, poking through boarded windows and tearing a hole in the roof. Like the shower-slasher scene from Hitchcock’s previous film, Psycho (1960), the house besieged became a constant in horror movies from Night of the Living Dead through The Purge. In The Birds, the winged creatures turn the tables, confining people to cages.
Humans are narrative-makers and the crowd inside the Tides Restaurant eagerly try to fit the inexplicable into their accustomed categories of thought. The religious drunk declares, “It’s the end of the world—thus says the Lord God.” He is closer to the apocalypse outside than the smug rationalist, Mrs. Bundy, who refuses to believe that gulls and crows are attacking. “I hardly think that either species has enough intelligence to launch a mass attack,” she huffs. The sheriff is also clueless and dismissive until the birds—with the help of a carelessly tossed match—set the town on fire. As the terror builds, a townswoman shrieks at Melanie, the stranger in their midst. “Who are you? What are you? I think you are evil!” Did Melanie carry a curse with her into Bodega Bay?
Ironically, Melanie is taking a university course in general semantics, a then-fashionable discipline that studied language as a representation of reality and the way the human mind processes information in an ongoing pursuit of meaning and resolution. There are patterns in The Birds, a rhythm of reality, but no discernable meaning and no resolution. At the conclusion, Mitch, Melanie, Lydia and Cathy slowly pull out of the driveway past a field covered in birds during a lull in the pattern and drive toward the sunrise of an uncertain future.
The Birds will be shown at the Oriental Theatre on Tuesday, Oct. 22, at 10 p.m.
