Films: 1960s
(1963) The Birds
Saturday, October 14, 2006
The Birds
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Released: 1963
Hitchcock taps into that secondary, more subtle, primordial fear.
It is not, in "The Birds," the unknown that threatens, but the known behaving in a manner unknowable.
Rod Taylor plays Mitch Brenner and Tippi Hedron plays Melanie Daniels. The pair are would-be lovers engaged in a debutante's game; a mating ritual at the end of the world.
After a minor confrontation in San Francisco, Melanie follows Mitch to his home in the idyllic fishing village Bodega Bay. There, she plays a fairly elaborate practical joke upon him, involving two love birds, while discovering that his magnetism is complicated.
One of the complications is Mitch's emotionally stunted devotion to his mother (Jessica Tandy), with whom he acts out a virtual marriage and raises his younger sister Cathy (Veronica Cartwright).
The other is that the woman with whom Mitch had his last major romance (Annie Hayworth, played by Suzanne Pleshette) has settled in Bodega Bay to remain close to him. Melanie boards with her while courting Mitch.
During this strange ritual, flocks of menacing birds gather around the Bodega Bay and then begin to attack the inhabitants. Scattered reports arrive by radio that other bird attacks have started in other towns. Bodega Bay becomes increasingly besieged until Mitch, Melanie and Mitch's family must board themselves inside their home and stave off the birds.
Hitchcock and screenwriter Evan Hunter crack into some weighty psychological and sociological issues in "The Birds."
As Mitch represents an unbalanced and unhealthy male in the faux marriage relationship at home, Melanie represents a woman character that is out of control if judged by what Hitchcock and Hunter suggest are societal norms.
Mitch is attractive and homebound, Melanie is attractive and female and predatory but unwilling, it seems, to settle into anything resembling a domestic role.
Hayworth, as Mitch's rejected lover, has settled into an orbital domestic role, teaching the children of Bodega Bay, including Mitch's sister. Veronica is aggressive in her opposition to the gossip-column girl that chases her son from San Francisco. Melanie's alleged sexual promiscuity, as reported in Veronica's newspapers, results in a societal and cosmic moral judgment that seems to manifest itself in the impending and swiftly escalating bird attacks.
Hitchcock and Hunter make few bones about the reason the ornithological universe tilts so quickly out of whack. Melanie is the first to be attacked, and the last in "The Birds." The innocent residents of Bodega Bay are collateral damage, mauled and killed throughout.
Following "The Birds'" second-to-last climax, in which a portion of Bodega Bay is set ablaze, huddled townsfolk accuse Melanie of bringing evil to the community, and directly indict her for the arrival of the birds. The submerged notion that Melanie's emergent powerful mid-20th Century female has intruded upon the isolated normalcy of Bodega Bay is thus brought to a head.
It is only at the end of the film, in the final climax when sexually independent Melanie has been properly pecked into physical and psychological submission in the (where else?) bedroom, that she acquiesces and can properly receive motherly care from Veronica.
The new relationship culminates in a specific and clear exchange of looks between the two women (as Veronica cradles the injured presumable daughter-in-law to be) in Mitch's car as the newly conventionalized family flees Bodega Bay by car.
Hitchcock and often favorite Director of Photography Robert Burks bring the same painterly qualities of "North by Northwest" and "Vertigo" to "The Birds," but the complexity and adventuresome sequences of "The Birds" exceed either previous collaboration.
In what may be the single most effective jump cut sequence of the 1960s, the pair capture a temporal and psychological truth as Melanie watches fire travel a line of gasoline back to its pump. Melanie's face is show in four specific stills, like images in a flip book, moving left to right. Her expression transforms, a brilliant moment of acting and directing. The audience never sees the fire move, just the conflagration start, and having stored the information about the gas and the pump from previous shots, Hedron and Hitchcock create a narrative in photographs. It is terrifying, surprising and it is the kind of innovative decision that only the medium of cinema could support.
As for the birds, Hitchcock is careful to never personify the creatures. To do so might have risked absurdity. He seldom shows their faces, and when he does it is glimpses of violent activity. Instead, the birds move as flocks, as blurs of light and dark in a scene. Hitchcock and Burks layer composites on top of filmed action, in addition to actual birds interacting with their actors.
The result is a three dimensional and disorienting whirl of chaos. The birds, in "The Birds" become on-screen metaphor for the forces of the natural and the metaphoric colliding. The storm of wings on the screen is the literal representation of an alarmed cosmos.
There are other plausible ways to read "The Birds," as an ecological warning (although the only actual postulation offered in script is when a villager mentions an offshore storm), or as a warning against general hubris (as when Ethel Griffies' ornithologist Mrs. Bundy calculates how many billions of birds peacefully coexist with humans on the planet).
It is the psycho-social landscape that bears the most fruit, however. Seated in the shifting culture and behavioral norms of the 1960s, "The Birds" is perhaps closest to "Rosemary's Baby" or "Repulsion" in its fearsome portrayal of the implications of new and dominant female roles in the United States.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
The Birds, 1963
It is only at the end of the film, in the final climax when sexually independent Melanie has been properly pecked into physical and psychological submission in the (where else?) bedroom, that she acquiesces and can properly receive motherly care from Veronica.
