Alfred Hitchcock (1963)
David Thomson has described The Birds as Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘last unflawed film’. It’s more like the first outing of the emperor’s new clothes, setting the trend which continued for the rest of Hitchcock’s post-Psycho career. Based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier, the screenplay by Evan Hunter (aka Ed McBain) takes an age to lay the ground for a competitive romance between Melanie Daniels, whose father owns a newspaper and who keeps getting a bad press in the social columns of rival publications, and a young San Francisco lawyer called Mitch Brenner. Mitch goes home for weekends to the family home in Bodega Bay, seventy miles up the coast. Once Melanie arrives there, the birds turn nasty and terrorise the Bodega Bay population over and over again, although panic takes some time to spread because the locals are remarkably uncommunicative about the attacks. Gulls set about children at a birthday party but there’s no suggestion that any of the kids bothers to mention the incident to their parents afterwards – that evening and after another attack at their home, the Brenners, who hosted the party, struggle to convince a policeman that the birds are behaving unusually. When, in one of the film’s strongest sequences, a farmer is found dead the following morning with his eyes pecked out, the police scepticism continues; so does the reticence of terrified children who are attacked leaving school later the same day.
There’s no denying that The Birds includes features bizarre enough to be intriguing, for a while anyway. The Brenner family comprises Mitch (Rod Taylor), apparently in his early thirties, his eleven-year-old sister Cathy (Veronica Cartwright) and their widowed mother Lydia (Jessica Tandy). Rod Taylor was thirty-two when the film was made and Jessica Tandy fifty-three but, even though Tandy is greyed up, Lydia and Mitch seem much closer in age than Mitch and Cathy (Veronica Cartwright was thirteen at the time). Lydia hasn’t got over her husband’s death four years previously and makes clear at one point that she thinks Mitch will never be the man his father was. This seems debatable at least: Mitch is professionally successful, shows nerve, resource and stamina when the birds attack, and, judging from his father’s portrait on the wall, is also much better-looking than the old man. And Lydia is very possessive of him. There’s a sexual undercurrent in their relationship – thanks to a combination of Taylor’s intelligent underplaying and Tandy’s gimlet-eyed intensity. This makes sense within the scheme of the story but it’s more noticeable because of the lack of any connection between Mitch and Melanie, although I guess there are admirers of the film who will find something brilliant in that vacancy.
Although she’d had small parts in a few films before, Tippi Hedren was a successful model when Hitchcock spotted her in the early 1960s and she’s more mannequin than actress, both in the way she looks and in the way Hitchcock uses her. She’s a toneless, stilted performer, with none of the warmth that her daughter Melanie Griffith brings to the screen. (Griffith wasn’t named after her mother’s famous character in The Birds – she was born in 1957.) Hedren’s relationship with the director is the only relationship she has in The Birds with any life to it. She gives nothing to the other actors but she evidently means something to Hitchcock. When we saw The Lodger last month, the man introducing it noted as worrying the connection between Hitchcock’s predilection for cool blondes and the fact that the serial killer in The Lodger murders fair-haired girls. This didn’t bother me watching the film or thinking about it afterwards but the treatment of Tippi Hedren in The Birds is something else. Each time her perfectly coiffured blonde helmet is messed up by the birds it retains its composure a few screen moments later. The pale green suit which Melanie wears throughout her time in Bodega Bay is crease- as well as bird-resistant. (She really is a stranger in town: when she first arrives she’s also wearing a fur coat although the locals are mostly dressed for summer). Melanie occasionally loses her self-possession but she never loses possession of her handbag. Whatever she’s required to do – moor a boat, climb a hill, sprint down the street – her high heels never get in the way of doing it. Hitchcock seems to adore her but also to want to trash her.
The first act of avian violence is by a single gull who divebombs Melanie as she rows back across the bay from the Brenners’ place, after leaving two caged lovebirds there (the birthday present that Mitch wanted to buy his kid sister when he and Melanie first ran into each other in San Francisco). She puts a finger to her head and sees the blood on it. The wound looks nasty – the blood runs down her temple then stops abruptly: it’s too soon for her perfect outfit to be sullied. An hour or so of screen time later, Melanie ventures alone into an upstairs room at the Brenners’ and the birds mount a mass attack – this time her hairdo and twopiece take a real hammering. Hitchcock has decided that Melanie has been immaculate long enough; what’s more, he appears to think that keeping her intact for most of the film is a good reason for giving this climactic assault everything he’s got. Although Tippi Hedren is irritatingly smug at the start of The Birds – enough for you to feel she deserves to be taught a lesson – I felt sorry for her by the end. The combination of Hitchcock’s treatment and her limitations as an actress makes her ridiculous. Melanie is severely traumatised by the birds’ last attack and Hedren acting severely traumatised has to be seen to be disbelieved. The wounds on Melanie’s face are symmetrically arranged. Lydia wraps a bandage round the top of her head and Melanie’s fringe flops over it. I think we’re meant to think that Lydia is genuinely sympathetic by now but it’s almost as if her deep-seated resentment of the woman who might take her son away impels Lydia to make Melanie, in her hour of need, look daft.
The birds’ behaviour in the Du Maurier story is (I understand) unexplained and it’s not difficult to find references online to Hitchcock’s repeating this mystery. It’s true there’s no comical Psycho-style final explanation of what’s been going on but the birds’ attacks start immediately after Melanie has deposited the lovebirds. Although the film’s final shot is ambiguous (are the birds that watch Melanie, Mitch, Lydia and Cathy drive away from Bodega Bay towards San Francisco sated or just waiting to do something even worse?), there’s some sense of escape for the principals, who are taking the lovebirds away with them. The implication is that Melanie’s light-hearted, flirty sparring with Mitch – the lovebirds are a piece of sexual oneupmanship on her part – is a fatal error. She doesn’t know what she’s letting herself in for. This sophisticated socialite hasn’t a clue about the dark depths and power of desire and jealousy – particularly, one assumes, female desire and jealousy. (Not only is Lydia pathologically possessive of Mitch; the local schoolteacher Annie (Suzanne Pleshette) also carries a torch for him.) Hitchcock taps into the ambivalent feelings that perhaps most people have about birds – their look and sound may be delightful in the open air but are frightening in the confined spaces where they don’t belong. He also exploits how differently we feel about birds in a cage and birds elsewhere indoors. One of the scary things about a bird trapped inside a house is that the creature itself is scared; the flapping of its wings expresses its own fear as it increases ours. When a swarm of sparrows comes down the chimney at the Brenner home, the moment is frightening because the birds seem impelled by a force outside themselves but the birds in The Birds which attack people by apparent malice aforethought are less and less terrifying. This is partly because the special effects by Ub Iwerks become familiar and partly because Hitchcock isn’t able to sustain the inventiveness of the early attacks. By the time the film was into the home straight the birds were having the same effect on me that the velociraptors in Jurassic Park eventually had. I wanted them to go away not because they were alarming but because they’d become boring.
The script is so full of holes that you have to give it the benefit of the doubt for some time. Is the Bodega Bay inhabitants’ reluctance to transmit information about the birds’ attacks meant to say something about an innate human tendency to refuse to accept terrifying truths? Is it because Melanie is in denial of the situation that she continues to drive around the place with the roof of her car off? Eventually you have to conclude that Evan Hunter’s writing is just slapdash and that Hitchcock, who’s evidently interested only in working towards highlights, couldn’t care less about that. Melanie says to Mitch, as they leave a scene of fiery carnage outside a diner, that they can now go and collect Cathy from Annie’s home (the teacher lives on the school premises). You think this is odd because the last you saw of Cathy she was running away from the school, trying to help one of her friends get from there back home. When Melanie and Mitch arrive at the school they find Annie’s dead body and see a terrified Cathy inside. They comfort her and she blurts out an explanation of how she came back to Annie’s even though Melanie and Mitch were already expecting her to find her there. In retrospect, the title sequence for The Birds is revealing and makes for an interesting comparison with Psycho. In the earlier film (The Birds’ immediate predecessor in Hitchcock’s filmography), the design and editing of the titles and Bernard Herrmann’s score are disturbing and disorienting but they in no way tell you what’s in store. Here there’s a lot of birds in silhouette on the screen and a welter of nasty shrieking on the soundtrack.
23 August 2012
