The Birds (film)

From Free net encyclopedia

The Birds (1963) is a horror film by Alfred Hitchcock, roughly based on a short story by Daphne Du Maurier with the same name. Hitchcock had earlier turned Du Maurier's novel Rebecca into an acclaimed film. It is one of the most famous horror films and was also significant as one of Hitchcock's last great films. The special effects and soundtrack of the film are extraordinary. Later films in the "revenge of nature" genre were influenced both by its content and its style.

The screenplay for The Birds was written by Evan Hunter, better known as crime fiction novelist Ed McBain. This film is notable in that it has no music score per se (other than brief source music); instead a montage of assorted bird calls and sound effects put together by perennial Hitchcock composer Bernard Herrmann provides the "incidental music".

In the film, various kinds of birds attack Bodega Bay, California (Sonoma County), a seaside village. In Du Maurier's story, the birds attack Britain, not California.

A quasi-sequel to the film was produced for cable TV in 1994 under the title The Birds II: Land's End. Starring Brad Johnson and Chelsea Field, it was not a success. (Tippi Hedren appeared in a supporting role playing a different character than in the first film.)

1 Synopsis
2 Background
- 2.1 Awards
- 2.2 Cameo
3 The Birds in popular culture
4 External links

[edit]

Synopsis

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The young socialite Melanie (Tippi Hedren) visits a downtown San Francisco pet shop on a Friday afternoon. Outside, seagulls gather menacingly in nearby Union Square. She meets Mitch (Rod Taylor), a lawyer who is looking for a pair of lovebirds to give to his little sister for her birthday. The young lady pretends to be the shopkeeper, showing him various types of birds (and mostly misidentifying them), until she accidentally releases a canary in the store. When Mitch reveals after the incident that he knows her as Melanie Daniels, the daughter of a newspaper magnate, and tells her off for being a spoiled prankster, she decides to get back at him by buying him the lovebirds he couldn't obtain and delivering them to his apartment the next morning. It turns out that Mitch spends his weekends in Bodega Bay, a small coastal town to the north of the city.

Arriving in Bodega Bay, she seeks out Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette), the local teacher, in order to learn the name of Mitch's sister Cathy (Veronica Cartwright). Then she travels across the bay by boat and stealthily enters Mitch's house, placing the present in the living room, but not before being spotted by Mitch. On her way back, a seagull inexplicably swoops down and gashes her forehead.

Cleaning up her wounds, Melanie gives Mitch the alibi that Annie was an old friend of hers and she wanted to pay a visit, which he immediately recognizes as a lie. She then returns to Annie's house, rents a room for the weekend, and later heads over to Mitch's house for dinner. There, his mother, Lydia (Jessica Tandy), argues with someone over the phone that the chicken feed she bought was defective—her chickens wouldn't eat a bite—only to learn that a local farmer's own fowl, who had been fed a different brand, have the same problem. After dinner, Melanie returns to Annie's house and the two are chatting about Mitch and his mother over a brandy when a thud is heard against the front door. Answering the door, Melanie discovers a dead seagull sprawled on the porch.

The next day, Cathy has a birthday party. A peaceful flock of birds makes its way across the clear blue sky as Melanie and Mitch walk along a bluff above the coast. Melanie reveals that her mother left their family when she was Cathy's age. Suddenly a bird swoops down and switches Cathy on the ear, and an attack on the party commences. Terrified children rush into the house as birds scratch, peck, and bite at them ravenously and without any apparent motive.

From then on things go from bad to worse, as bird attacks increase both in scope and severity. On Monday morning, Lydia drives to the farm whose owner's chickens are also refusing to eat and discovers a gory corpse with its eyes gouged out. After fleeing the scene in hysteria, Lydia takes to her bed, but she can't rest because she is worried about Cathy at school. Melanie offers to go retrieve the child. A large flock of crows gathers in the playground, and when Melanie helps evacuate the school, they viciously tear at the children, nearly killing one of them.

At the Tides Restaurant, an elderly birdwatcher (Ethel Griffies) opines that humanity wouldn't stand a chance against the hundred billion or more birds on earth, whom she smugly regards as harmless—until another attack begins outside. After a gull swoops down onto a gas station attendant, a trail of gasoline makes its way into the restaurant's parking lot, where a man is lighting a cigar. The garbled warning cries of bystanders are misunderstood, and the resulting shattering explosion soon alerts scores of birds, who attack everyone who cannot manage to get indoors. Melanie runs to assist, but she quickly retreats to a phone booth after she too is assailed by the birds. From that vantage point, she bears witness to a horrific spectacle as birds rush at her from all angles. The local fire department soon arrives to fight the fire and ends up fighting the birds instead. A dying man stumbles toward the phone booth, but he quickly collapses and leaves a streak of blood on the glass, which the birds then begin to shatter by flying directly into it. Finally, Mitch ventures into the storm and brings her back into the restaurant, where a hysterical mother (Doreen Lang) accuses her of being the cause of the attacks.

At last, the screeching of the birds comes to an end. Melanie sets out in search of Annie and Cathy. Annie lies dead on her porch, while a terrified Cathy uncontrollably sobs inside. Melanie comforts Cathy and Mitch takes the body into the house as dusk approaches.

Cathy, Melanie, Mitch, and Lydia hole up in their house, boarding up all the windows, doors, and openings, with the exception of a single fireplace in which a fire is kept burning all night long. In this claustrophobic setting, the four spend hours wondering when the next attack will come. Finally, a clamor erupts, and Mitch quickly checks and repairs breaches while the others scurry from one corner of living room to another, acting like caged birds terrified out of their wits. The power goes out, and Mitch gets a flashlight. Image:The Birds - Rod Taylor - Tippi Hedren.jpg The attack subsides. Before dawn, Melanie wakes up with the intuition that something is terribly wrong. She grabs Mitch's flashlight and carefully examines the rooms, then cautiously treads the stairs, opens the door to Cathy's bedroom, and goes inside. Birds attack her from all sides as she gazes at a gigantic hole in the ceiling. Unable to fight, she collapses onto the floor, nearly dying before Mitch and Lydia rescue her. Realizing that she is in shock and needs to get to a hospital, Mitch tells the others that they have to leave. He daringly ventures outside to get the car. Here, Hitchcock offers one of the most surreal and apocalyptic scenes to appear in the film, as a sea of landed birds ripples menacingly around him, but doesn't attack. Mitch quietly enters the garage and turns on the car radio, which reports that bird attacks have occurred further inland, mentioning the town of Santa Rosa, California, about thirty miles away. He brings the car around front and helps Cathy, Melanie, and Lydia inside, then drives away, parting waves of birds that seem to lie in anticipation of something.

[edit]

Background

It was important to Hitchcock never to explain in the movie why the birds attack humans. Thus, the attacks are either interpreted as the revenge of nature, as a sign of the apocalypse or as a cold war thread. Another theory states that the attacks always occur when the superficiality of human relationships surfaces in the movie: the flirtatious conversations of Melanie and Mitch, the fear of loneliness, the rejection of Melanie by Mitch's mother.

The movie does not feature a musical soundtrack in the common sense. Instead, Hitchcock had Oskar Sala play in bird sounds on his Trautonium, which were then scored to the movie by Bernard Herrmann. The fact that there are no natural bird sounds to be heard in this movie also makes it notable in the field of musicology.

The ending to this movie is abrupt; some surmise that this was to allow the audience to make their own minds as to why these birds attacked, or what the characters' fate will be. An apocryphal story states that Hitchcock had planned an ending for the movie in which the characters succeed in reaching San Francisco only to find the birds ominously perched on Golden Gate Bridge but was forced to shelve this idea due to the expense involved. The caged lovebirds brought along throughout the movie are thought by some to serve as a subtle justification for the bird attacks.

Hitchcock also asserted that the film not end with final "The End", which further hints towards the lyrical nature of the movie (quote by Federico Fellini: "An apokalyptical poem")

[edit]

Awards

The movie was nominated for an Oscar in the category of special effects. Tippi Hedren received the Golden Globe for her acting in this movie, as the most promising newcomer of 1964. She shared this award with Ursula Andress and Elke Sommer.

[edit]

Cameo

Alfred Hitchcock appears rather early in the movie. He leaves the pet shop in which the protagonists meet with dogs on a leash. Because of the increasing fame of Hitchcock and his Cameo appearances, his obligatory appearances occurred earlier and earlier in the movies since the late 50s, as he feared distracting the viewers from the storyline.

[edit]

The Birds in popular culture

In Mel Brooks' movie High Anxiety (1978) he parodies several Hitchcock films, including The Birds. Here, the birds attack by leaving droppings on people's heads.

The Simpsons make many references to this move, one of the first being in A Streetcar Named Marge, when in the scene where Homer, Bart and Lisa pick up Maggie from the day-care center before attending O! Streetcar!, the babies are perched all over the building, staring at the family and quietly sucking on pacifiers. This is a spoof of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.As part of a run-on gag, when Homer and the kids leave, a "Simpsons" version of Hitchcock is seen walking his dogs on the sidewalk past the day-care. This parodies how Hitchcock usually made himself an extra in many of his films. (Taken from the Simpsons article)

In the Simpsons episode Itchy And Scratchy Land (1994) Marge, at a certain point when the robots in the Itchy & Scratchy theme park threaten to kill them, says: "I knew we should have gone to the bird sanctuary." In the bird sanctuary however, the birds have gone crazy like in Hitchcock's film. Hans Moleman is shown trying to make a call in a phone booth while the birds crash against the glass, just like in a certain scene in the movie.

In "Night of the Dolphins," the final segment of The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror XI (2000), the invading dolphins stand on their tails on the power lines, much like the birds in Hitchcock's film.

In Jimmy Neutron episode "When Pants Attack," when Judy Neutron sees the swarms of pants gathering in town, she says, "Why, it looks like an homage to Alfred Hitchcock's movie The Birds!"

[edit]