Cheep-cheep and bad birdseed, it’s Burl, here to Hitch your wagon to a new review, ha ha! Today I want to review a movie I’ve seen many times, but always enjoy; and ha ha, you know, though it’s not perfect, I think it just keeps getting better! It’s Alfred Hitchcock’s tale of avian disturbance, The Birds!
I think you all know the story: birds
attack, nobody knows why! But it’s also a people story, with flighty (ha ha!)
San Francisco socialite Melanie Daniels, played by Tippi Hedren from Marnie, acting like a complete maniac
and following handsome lawyer Rod Taylor, whom we remember from The Time Machine, up the coast to Bodega
Bay in order to teach him a lesson by gifting a pair of lovebirds to his little
sister! Ha ha, yes, her plan is as insane as it sounds! She sort of reminds me of Marion Crane and her little pile of cash in Psycho!
Up in Bodega Bay, Melanie rents a boat from none other than Doodles Weaver from The Errand Boy! It seems that Rod Taylor, playing the rather smug Mitch Brenner, is up for the weekend visiting his mom Lydia, essayed by Jessica Tandy from Cocoon, and his little sister Cathy, a pubescent performance from Veronica Cartwright of The Witches of Eastwick! Meanwhile the local schoolmistress, Suzanne Pleshette from The Shaggy D.A., is obviously carrying a torch for Mitch, but lets Melanie rent a room for the night in her house anyway! Ha ha, they even become friends, after a fashion!
Given that Melanie has some growing up to do (but also has done some growing up previous to the opening moments of the story), and frosty old Lydia, the world’s primmest chicken farmer, has her own obvious if obscure son-related issues, and Pleshette’s character Annie Hayworth is jealous, sad, and stoic all at the same time, there’s plenty of soap opera material available here! But Hitch knows how to do all this stuff in his own way, and the drama and the bird attacks are somehow all of a piece!
And those bird attacks! Ha ha, this surely must have been a heck of a shoot, especially for old Hitch, who was afraid of birds! But the technical wizardry from such accomplished trick effect folks as Ub Iwerks and Albert Whitlock, and many others besides, still dazzles after all these years, and so the movie is a great pleasure to watch from a technical standpoint! It looks good too, except for the odd dud of a studio shot, ha ha!
There’s an artifice to the human element that the picture never really overcomes, but that really does get swept aside by the principal element, as underlined by the title itself: The Birds! Those flappers and squawkers and beakéd beasts really do their stuff, ha ha, and as a result the movie is a grand entertainment in the way only Hitchcock could create! They peck out eyes, they go after old folks and children, they bust through doors and swoop down chimneys and blow up gas stations, and if I were to list all the ways in which this picture is superior to Beaks: The Movie, we’d be here all day! Ha ha! I give The Birds three and a half old lady berets!
I just re-watched this one recently myself! It plays very differently in our pandemic era, let me tell you!
ReplyDeleteAgreed! Taking this approach, the restaurant scene sort of becomes the centerpiece of the film!
DeleteIt does get better each time you see it, doesn't it? And without this we'd have no Birdemic. Thanks, Hitch!
ReplyDeleteFunny to see how The Birds affected the disaster movie era, with the abundance of soap opera set up and then obliterating the puny human concerns with a big ol' calamity.
That's true! I wonder if this is the approach taken by older disaster movies, like A Night To Remember and San Francisco! I've not seen either of those, and one day I should!
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