The Birds

Because I used to dismiss "The Birds" as simply Hitchcock at his hokiest, I was surprised how much I liked the film when I rewatched it recently. The love story is both lame and ridiculous; Rod Taylor is a lawyer and Melanie (Tippi Hendren) is a spoiled heiress and a prankster--but really they're both squares. Of course, Taylor's mother, Lydia (Jessica Tandy), is a salty old widow who distrusts his suitors and fears abandonment. And we're given an erstwhile lover of Taylor's who has relocated herself to Bodega Bay--the Northern California town that becomes the birds' prey--even though she and the attorney are now "just friends." Worst of all, Taylor's eleven-year-old sister (who begs the question, how old is Taylor supposed to be?) is terribly precocious and disturbingly fond of Melanie. This soggy subplot is either hackneyed soap opera or a stroke of genius: the random onslaught of the aviary exposes how trite these unbelievable stock characters are. One character mentions Oedipus in reference to Taylor's relationship with his mother; later on, Lydia finds a victim of a bird attack whose eyes have been pecked out.

Usually Hitchcock's famous "maguffin" was negligible (i.e. nuclear plans in "Notorious," stolen information in "North by Northwest") and the romance was at the heart of the flick; here, it's the other way around. However, given the amount of screen time devoted to the boy-meets-girl story and the fact that a few scenes--particularly a monologue given by Tandy in bed--are particularly well-acted, it's hard to believe that a big part of Hitchcock did not buy into the old movie treacle. Regardless, there's some brilliant Soviet-style editing and Hitchcock's decision to not have any music on the soundtrack--in lieu of electronic bird noises--is quite effectively chilly, despite the fact that he sacrificed what could have been another great Bernard Herrmann score in order to attain it. Plus, aside from the silly, irrational plot (both the birds and the melodrama) there are some explicitly funny scenes, such as an exchange between a miserly old ornithologist and a casual harbinger of the apocalypse at a café. (This may lead some to read a green, anti-industrialization message into the movie, but I think it's wiser to see it as Biblical hokum meant to ratchet up the confusion and terror.) In many ways, this movie is a precursor to "Jaws," which was still twelve years away.