The Fever Film Club #5
The Birds (1963)
100 Movies You Should See Before We All Die
The Corvids Is Coming!
This club convenes remotely as a public service while social distancing.
The sun is out, the day is warm. The playground is quiet; the only sound comes from inside the one-room schoolhouse, where children sing a silly song. Bodega Bay exudes health and contentment across generations. There have been a couple of very troubling incidents, including the death of a neighbor. Still, no reason not to relax and smoke a cigarette; the Surgeon General’s report won’t come out until next year, and warnings on packages won’t start showing up until they pass a law. But there’s something unseen in the background, something that will force everyone to go inside, to shelter in place.
Corvids (crows) are gathering on the jungle gym, multiplying like viruses, big black feathered viruses. A minute ago there was one, now there are 19, soon there’ll be thousands, too many to count. Some kids won’t make it home from school. Before nightfall, everyone will have to shut their doors and windows tight and remain isolated for who knows how long. Days? Weeks?
I can’t count the total number of times I’ve watched Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), but I can count the number of times I’ve watched it over the past two days. Three. Three times. The last two on glorious blu-ray thanks to a generous member of The Fever Film Club. And now it can be told: according to me, The Birds is not just the last of the great Hitchcock masterpieces; it is, in its way, the artistic equal of Psycho (1960).
There was a time I might have expected that declaration to be controversial. Little did I know how controversial it was in 1963. For most of my life the general critical consensus on The Birds was that it marked the beginning of Hitchcock’s decline as a cinematic artist, that it was the first of the lesser works, a harbinger of the psychiatric superficiality of Marnie (1964), the unevenness of Torn Curtain (1966), the cold-war nonsense of Topaz (1969). It wasn’t until the excitement of The Master’s return to greatness and his native U.K. with Frenzy (1972) that we could think beyond Psycho. I don’t think I ever really considered The Birds part of the decline, but it’s only over the past couple of decades that I’ve come to appreciate just how beautiful a movie it is.
In fact, The Birds, released in 1963 when everyone really did believe nuclear war with the USSR was just around the corner (and narrowly avoided only a year earlier when Kennedy went nose to nose with Khrushchev, and the Russian “blinked,” as cold warriors used to claim gleefully), is a near-perfect fit for today’s pandemic-obsessed sheltering-to-the-point-of-madness movie-hungry quarantinista. An unimaginably horrible threat looming overhead: bombs and birds are inscrutable and come to us through thin air. Just like viruses. My wife lived in Moscow in 1962, and she remembers her own and her playmates’ fear, and their inability to understand why anyone would want to start a nuclear war. Why is this happening? Why are they doing this to us?
Why are the birds attacking people? That’s the MacGuffin, screenwriter Angus MacPhail’s term, adopted by Hitchcock in the ’30s, for the “object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself.” (From Wikipedia; see link below.) Just for fun, I’ll quote Hitchcock’s famous description from a 1939 lecture at Columbia University:
“It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men on a train. One man says, ‘What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?’ And the other answers, ‘Oh, that’s a MacGuffin’. The first one asks, ‘What’s a MacGuffin?’ ‘Well,’ the other man says, ‘it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ The first man says, ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,’ and the other one answers, ‘Well then, that’s no MacGuffin!’”
Treat yourself to a rewarding read of Daphne du Maurier’s excellent, chilling 1952 short story, The Birds (link below), in which one character speculates that the trouble has been caused deliberately by “the Russians.” The Birds is, without a doubt, a Cold War movie, as it had been a Cold War story. I was too young to be taken to see it when it was released, but I was delighted by the parody in Mad Magazine issue #82 (“For The Birds”), in October 1963. Any doubt about Cold War preoccupations are, in retrospect, immediately eliminated when you look at the cover art for the issue with the Birds parody inside: a portrait of Fidel Castro smoking a cigar that is about to explode in his face.
The irony, given the proximity in time to JFK’s assassination, and reports of CIA efforts to poison Fidel’s cigars, is quite staggering. I’d been scared half to death by Radio Free Europe TV commercials that convinced me Castro and Khrushchev were coming to my house to kill me, so the idea that Alfred E. Neuman could blow up Fidel was fun and funny.
In those days Hitchcock, the master showman, was ubiquitous; I knew him from his television show, his genuinely scary LPs, his mystery magazine, and from his movies that had already made it to afternoon TV. (The first prime-time New York area telecast of Psycho raised public protests, and was cancelled because The Boston Strangler was still at large and in the news that week.) I thought The Birds’ marketing campaign was designed to make the movie seem ridiculous. The advertising tagline — “The Birds Is Coming!” — was funny even to a third-grader with elementary training in grammar. And the phrase was used repeatedly in the Mad Magazine parody, drawn by the late, great Mort Drucker.
There was something in popular culture that made its way down to my level to indicate that this was not a movie worth taking seriously. And that attitude lasted past everyone’s excitement over the release of Frenzy, and later Family Plot (1976). It lasted for me until I finally saw The Birds, and found out it was a great movie.
I was unaware in 1963 (age 8 years) that I was living through a late phase of a period in American (specifically, New York) intellectual life in which critics of art and culture were capable of attacking one another viciously in print, and even in public, over things that modern critics no longer consider earth-shattering. I didn’t know, for example, that my future hero, Village Voice film critic Andrew Sarris loved The Birds (from his review: “Alfred Hitchcock has fashioned a major work of cinematic art, and ‘cinematic’ is the operative term here, not ‘literary’ or ‘sociological…The Birds finds Hitchcock at the summit of his artistic talents.”), and that this moved Esquire Magazine film critic Dwight Macdonald to attack Sarris’ entire approach to film criticism with mean ferocity and flat-out contemptuousness. Movie reviews may still affect box office receipts, and disagreements flare up over such things as violations of the Marvel Comics mythology, but they’re no longer anywhere near the vital heart of what remains of the public conversation about movies. I think that’s because the movie industry no longer harbors figures of the artistic and personal stature of Alfred Hitchcock, and the American public no longer treats intellectuals with the automatic respect they used to get even in mainstream, mass-market publications.
By 1963, Dwight Macdonald was a longtime, prominent member of “The New York Intellectuals,” and already had a decades-long career as a radical left-wing political and social critic, editor, writer and philosopher. His cultural criticism, beginning in the 1950s, focused on what he saw as the mediocrity of rising mass media, including movies. In his Esquire review of The Birds, he ridiculed the French New Wave critical theory, the politique des auteurs (The Auteur Theory, which placed Hitchcock in highest esteem) that Sarris had brought to America, and ridiculed Sarris and Hitchcock personally. He began his review this way: “The only point of interest about The Birds is that it’s by Alfred Hitchcock, who once had a deserved reputation as a master technician.” Whole passages of the review insult Sarris, who, according to Macdonald “…has lately been clambering up from the primeval swamps of the Voice, Film Culture, and the New York Film Bulletin.”
And so, although as a child I had a feeling that The Birds was not generally viewed as a serious movie, I had no idea that it was used as an instrument of intellectual assault. The Auteur Theory (the proposition that the director is the true “author” of the film) was canon and Andrew Sarris was infallible by the time I became serious about watching movies (age 12 years). Read Macdonald’s review (link below) and see how deep and even damaging intellectual arguments over movies could be back then. The strangest part is seeing how willing this prominent critic was to attack Hitchcock as essentially a hack movie director, an unthinkable position today. In fact, The Birds was excoriated by most critics upon release, and somehow that message worked its way down to me.
It’s nice to be able to reach back to 1963 and find that writer Peter Bogdanovich’s (5 years before he became a film director) assessment of Hitchcock has won the argument: “If he had never made another picture in his life, The Birds would place him securely among the giants of the cinema. And that is where he belongs.” Bogdanovich believed that The Birds “topped” even Psycho. I won’t go that far, because they’re such different films, but I’ve already said I think it’s as good artistically as Psycho. Hitchcock had perfected a style, a method and a process whose result is instantly recognizable.
Hitchcock famously constructed his films shot by shot on storyboards before filming began, and claimed that the actual shooting of the movie was a boring inconvenience, since he’d done all the real work of creating the movie already. But Hitchcock had at his disposal the greatest technicians in the film industry at the time to bring his preparation to fruition, and the execution of his plan is precise, deliberate and effective. His best films proceed from shot to shot with a kind of perfect inevitability. Watching Hitchcock’s work, seeing how the shots and scenes progress, one finds oneself thinking, “yes, that’s right.” That’s exactly the right angle. That’s exactly the right scene length. That’s exactly the right gesture from that character.
His framing and his camera movement is distinctive. Take his travelling point-of-view shots: a character is walking, sometimes driving, looking intently at something, and Hitchcock cuts to the character’s P.O.V., with the same lens, the camera at the same height, moving in the appropriate direction at precisely the same speed, creating an effect that brings the audience into the character’s P.O.V. as no other director does. He does this repeatedly throughout The Birds.
Hitchcock, more than any other of his contemporaries, experimented with special effects and matte photography with a mix of subtlety and spectacle that was unique. His solutions to practical questions required innovative, cutting-edge technical solutions. How does he show, from directly above, a man falling from the torch of the Statue of Liberty in Sabateur (1942); how does he approximate the dizzying viewpoint of someone suffering from vertigo who must climb a steep, open staircase in Vertigo (1958); and in The Birds, how does he achieve a birds-eye view of a town in chaos during an attack by seagulls? He does it by asking his technical team to do what’s never, or rarely, been done before, and to do it perfectly, seamlessly, bringing the viewer farther into the film instead of taking him/her out to ask, “How did he do that?”
Hitchcock had a technique of staging scenes of spectacular technical and/or dramatic accomplishment, which anchor crucial moments in the plots of his films. Think of them as set pieces: the monumental crane shot starting at the very top of Claude Rains’ giant mansion’s foyer, and slowly travelling all the way down to hip level to reveal the key held secretly in Ingrid Bergman’s hand in Notorious (1946); the sequence in Rear Window (1954) when we finally see convincing evidence that a murder has taken place, and Grace Kelly asks James Stewart to “Tell me exactly what you saw, and what you think it means.”; Stewart’s dizzying climb up the tower staircase in Vertigo; and of course, the shower scene and the staircase murder in Psycho.
In The Birds, I counted no fewer than eight set pieces varying in intensity from startling to terrifying, ranging from the first harbinger of trouble, the attack in the rowboat, through the attack of the crows in the schoolyard, to the literal bird’s-eye view of the destruction of the center of town (accomplished with the indispensable artistry of one of the utterly realistic matte paintings created by Albert Whitlock for the film, combined with state-of-the-art, purely mechanical, analog special effects photography that puts today’s digital effects to shame).
The incredible complexity of these set pieces, dependent as they are on remarkable photographic (analog) special effects, are completely convincing and call no attention to themselves as special effects, but instead create thrilling moments that serve the story, the structure, the plot of the film. The scene where Tippi Hedren is trapped upstairs in a room full of birds is comparable in cinematic complexity to the shower scene in Psycho.
(Hedren claims that Hitchcock knew she had a fear of birds, promised to use fake birds in this scene, and then ended up shooting for days in a set full of real birds, which caused her to suffer an emotional collapse. She also says she was sexually assaulted by Hitchcock. Others on the set saw Hitchcock exhibit obsessive jealousy and possessiveness; disturbing links below. Not new.)
Hitchcock cast The Birds magnificently. My favorite is Ethel Griffies (as the tweedy ornithologist-by-avocation, Mrs. Bundy) who delivers the line that most explicitly spells out the stakes in this story, when she responds to a report that different kinds of birds attacked together as a group:
“I have never known birds of different species to flock together. The very concept is unimaginable. Why, if that happened, we wouldn’t stand a chance! How could we possibly hope to fight them?”
(The very thought of a virus like COVID-19, with no vaccine, no effective treatment, and no government plan of action is unimaginable. Why, if such a virus came along, we wouldn’t stand a chance!)
Tippi Hedren, despite her lack of acting experience, is remarkable as the seemingly cool but mischievous “poor little rich girl.” Rod Taylor’s self-righteous lawyer becomes everyone’s rock when disaster strikes. Suzanne Pleshette is sublime, lovely and sensitive as the doomed ex-girlfriend who can’t let go. Jessica Tandy at first appears to be a smothering parent incapable of expressing love, but reveals much greater depth and vulnerability. Veronica Cartwright is perfectly convincing as a terrified young girl. The bit parts, cast from leading and character actors of the ’40s and ’50s, as well as easily-recognizable ’60s TV actors, play their parts perfectly within Hitchcock’s meticulously-designed, constructed and executed technical scheme, a scheme that is so ingenious, it rises to the level of art you can’t stop looking at.
More than anything, The Birds conveys the kind of terror people felt when they imagined the unseen threat of nuclear destruction; the kind of terror people feel today when they try to imagine when and how a microbe might invade and destroy their bodies, or the bodies of their loved ones. It’s all there: the futile search for cause and meaning; the lack of an effective response that would ensure safety; the loneliness of a struggle that requires shutting oneself and one’s family behind doors that mustn’t be opened.
I would be deserving of serious physical harm if I didn’t mention the contribution of the man whose musical artistry played such a huge role in the beauty of some of Hitchcock’s greatest films (especially his greatest film, Vertigo): Bernard Herrmann. The same person whose music — from Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), the first film he scored, through Psycho, and finally to Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) — made him one of (in my opinion) the three greatest film composers in history. The others, of course, are Nino Rota, and the Maestro, Ennio Morricone.
There is no composed music in The Birds. In fact, (spoiler alert) the only music in the film is the nonsense song sung by the children in the Bodega Bay School just before the crows attack. The soundtrack consists of electronically-produced bird sounds, meticulously created under Hitchcock’s supervision, and fashioned by Herrmann into what I would describe as a tour-de-force, one of the most effective soundtracks of any film, any time, anywhere.
Sadly, a couple of years later, Hitchcock made the disastrous mistake of believing studio executives who told him that Herrmann’s excellent score for Torn Curtain would make the movie seem “old-fashioned,” and he rejected the score after listening to only a small section. The director and the composer so beautifully linked by their art parted ways and never reconciled. Herrmann began composing scores for a newer generation of filmmakers: Truffaut, DePalma, Scorsese. He died hours after finishing conducting and recording his score for Taxi Driver, rightly considered a classic. He was 64 years old, my present age. At a preview screening I attended with my future wife before the release of Taxi Driver, the audience was asked to remain seated until the final screen credit: Scorsese’s dedication of the film to Bernard Herrmann.
There are too many links below this article. I apologize. And I need to re-examine the late films considered inferior by almost everyone; are we making a mistake? Is Marnie actually a masterpiece? Is Torn Curtain worth watching just for the kitchen murder scene? There’s just too much to know about The Birds and everything that came before and after it. Books, sections of books and even a movie are devoted to The Birds (and to Hitchcock’s apparent abuse of Tippi Hedren). And I haven’t even scratched the surface of its sublime structural perfection, its expert pacing, it’s enigmatic depth. Go and watch it in isolation . Watch it three times in a row. Love it.
Watching this movie on a small laptop computer is disrespectful to cinema. Phones are out of the question. Hyperlinks appear below.
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How to watch the movie:
justwatch.com The Birds; Stream, Rent, Buy, watch here, watch now
deepdiscount.com buy the DVD
Find out about The Birds:
IMDB
Wikipedia
Find out about Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock:
IMDB
Wikipedia (including how Sir Alfred sexually harrassed Tippi Hedren)
Read Daphne du Maurier’s wonderful short story:
The Birds at Wordpress
Read Evan Hunter’s excellent screenplay:
horrorlair.com
Read Dwight Macdonald’s horrible review of The Birds:
Esquire
Read about the MacGuffin:
Wikipedia
Read about the great Bernard Herrmann:
Wikipedia
Read about the great Mort Drucker:
Wikipedia
The Official Special Edition Melanie Daniels Barbie Doll:
The Unofficial Post-Attack Melanie Daniels Doll:
Find out about the proprietor of The Fever Film Club:
IMDB
The New Press
Vimeo
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