The Birds (film)
| The Birds | |
|---|---|
Theatrical release poster | |
| Directed by | Alfred Hitchcock |
| Produced by | Alfred Hitchcock |
| Screenplay by | Evan Hunter |
| Based on | The Birds by Daphne du Maurier |
| Starring | Rod Taylor Tippi Hedren Jessica Tandy Suzanne Pleshette Veronica Cartwright |
| Cinematography | Robert Burks, ASC |
| Edited by | George Tomasini |
| Distributed by | Universal Pictures |
| Release dates |
|
| Running time | 119 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $3.3 million[1] |
| Box office | $11,403,529[2] |
The Birds is a 1963 suspense/horror film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, loosely based on the 1952 story "The Birds" by Daphne du Maurier. It depicts Bodega Bay, California, which is, suddenly and for unexplained reasons, the subject of a series of widespread and violent bird attacks over the course of a few days.
The film features the screen debut of Tippi Hedren. It also starred Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleshette, and Veronica Cartwright.
The film was written by Evan Hunter. Hitchcock told him to develop new characters and a more elaborate plot, keeping du Maurier's title and concept of unexplained bird attacks.
Contents
[show]
Plot[edit]
Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), a young socialite, meets lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) in a San Francisco pet shop. He wants to purchase a pair of lovebirds for his sister's eleventh birthday, but the shop has none. He recognizes her from a previous encounter, but she does not remember him, so he plays a prank by pretending to mistake her for a salesperson. She is infuriated when she realizes this, even though she also likes to play practical jokes. Intrigued, she finds his address in Bodega Bay, purchases a pair of lovebirds, and takes the long drive to deliver them. She secretly deposits the birdcage inside his mother's house, with a note. He spots her on the water through a pair of binoculars during her retreat, and manages to talk to her after she is attacked and injured by a seagull. He invites her to dinner, and she hesitantly agrees.
Melanie develops a relationship with Mitch, his widowed mother, Lydia (Jessica Tandy), and his younger sister, Cathy (Veronica Cartwright). She also befriends local school teacher Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette), who is Mitch's ex-lover. When she spends the night at Annie's house, they are startled by a loud thud; a gull has killed itself by flying into the front door. At Cathy's birthday party the next day, the guests are set upon by seagulls. The following evening, sparrows invade the Brenner home through the chimney.
The next morning, Lydia visits a neighboring farmer to discuss the unusual behavior of their chickens. She discovers his eyeless corpse, the result of a bird assault on his house. She flees the scene in terror. After being comforted by Melanie and Mitch, she expresses concern for Cathy's safety at school. Melanie drives there and waits for class to end, unaware that a huge number of crows are massing nearby. Horrified when she sees the jungle gym engulfed by them, she warns Annie, and they evacuate the children from the schoolhouse for reasons unknown. The commotion stirs the crows, and they attack, injuring several of the children.
Melanie meets Mitch at a local restaurant. Several patrons describe their own encounters with strange bird behavior. A drunken doomsayer believes the attacks are a sign of the Apocalypse, and a traveling salesman suggests exterminating them all. An amateur ornithologist dismisses the reports of attacks as fanciful and argues about it with Melanie. A young mother becomes increasingly distressed by the conversation and chides them all for frightening her children. The birds begin to attack people outside the restaurant. At a nearby gas station, a gas station attendant is attacked while filling a car with gasoline; he is knocked unconscious and, predating automatic shut-off, the gasoline pours out onto the street. The salesman from the restaurant, unaware that he is standing in a puddle of the gasoline, attempts to light a cigar. The gasoline ignites, killing him. The birds attack in greater numbers as people pour from the restaurant to survey the damage; Melanie is forced to take refuge in a phone booth as the birds create chaos outside, stabbing and pecking people, causing traffic accidents and many other severe injuries. Mitch rescues her and they return to the restaurant, where the hysterical mother accuses her of being "evil" and causing the attacks, causing her to slap the mother out her hysterics, and the ornithologist sits in stunned silence, not arguing any longer. She and Mitch return to Annie's house and find that she has been killed by the birds while pushing Cathy indoors to safety.
Melanie and the Brenners barricade themselves inside the Brenner home. It is attacked by waves of birds, which several times nearly break in through the sealed doors and windows. During a nighttime lull between attacks, Melanie hears noises from the upper floor. Not wanting to disturb the others' sleep, she enters Cathy's abandoned bedroom and finds that the birds have broken through the roof. They violently attack her, trapping her in the room until Mitch comes to her rescue. She is badly injured and nearly catatonic; Mitch insists they must get her to the hospital. A sea of birds ripple menacingly around the Brenner house as he prepares her car for their escape. The radio reports the spread of bird attacks to nearby communities, and suggests that the National Guard may be required to intervene because civil authorities are unable to combat the inexplicable attacks. The film concludes ambiguously, as the car carrying Melanie, the Brenners, and the lovebirds slowly makes its way through a landscape in which tens of thousands of birds are perching.
Cast[edit]
- Tippi Hedren as Melanie Daniels
- Rod Taylor as Mitch Brenner
- Jessica Tandy as Lydia Brenner
- Suzanne Pleshette as Annie Hayworth
- Veronica Cartwright as Cathy Brenner
- Ethel Griffies as Mrs. Bundy
- Charles McGraw as Sebastian Sholes
- Ruth McDevitt as Mrs. MacGruder
- Malcolm Atterbury as Deputy Al Malone
- Elizabeth Wilson as Helen Carter
- Lonny Chapman as Deke Carter
- Alfred Hitchcock makes his signature cameo as a man walking dogs out of the pet shop at the beginning of the film. They were two of his own Sealyham terriers, Geoffrey and Stanley.[3]
Production[edit]
Development[edit]
On August 18, 1961, residents in the town of Capitola, California, awoke to find sooty shearwaters slamming into their rooftops, and their streets covered with dead birds. News reports suggested domoic acid poisoning (amnesic shellfish poisoning) as the cause. According to a local newspaper, the Santa Cruz Sentinel, Alfred Hitchcock requested news copy in 1961 to use as "research material for his latest thriller".[4] At the end of the same month, he hired Evan Hunter to adapt Daphne du Maurier's novella, "The Birds", first published in her 1952 collection The Apple Tree.[5] Hunter had previously written "Vicious Circle" for Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, which he adapted for the television anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.[6] He also adapted Robert Turner's story "Appointment at Eleven" for the same television series.[5] Hunter later suspected that he was hired because he had demonstrated he could write suspense (with the 87th Precinct novels, as Ed McBain) and because his novel The Blackboard Jungle had received critical acclaim.[7] The relationship between Hunter and Hitchcock during the creation of The Birds was documented by the writer in his 1997 autobiography Me and Hitch, which contains a variety of correspondence between the writer, director and Hitchcock's assistant, Peggy Robertson.[8]
Hunter began working on the screenplay in September 1961.[9] He and Hitchcock developed the story, suggesting foundations such as the townspeople having a guilty secret to hide, and the birds an instrument of punishment.[10] He suggested that the film begin using some elements borrowed from the screwball comedy genre then have it evolve into "stark terror".[11][12][13] This appealed to Hitchcock, according to the writer, because it conformed to his love of suspense: the title and the publicity would have already informed the audience that birds attack, but they do not know when. The initial humor followed by horror would turn the suspense into shock.[10]
Hitchcock solicited comments from several people regarding the first draft of Hunter's screenplay. Consolidating their criticisms, Hitchcock wrote to Hunter, suggesting that the script (particularly the first part) was too long, contained insufficient characterization in the two leads, and that some scenes lacked drama and audience interest.[14] Hitchcock at later stages consulted with his friends Hume Cronyn (whose wife Jessica Tandy was playing Lydia) and V.S. Pritchett, who both offered lengthy reflections on the work.[15]
Soundtrack[edit]
Hitchcock decided to do without any conventional incidental score.[16] Instead, he made use of sound effects and sparse source music in counterpoint to calculated silences. He wanted to use the electroacoustic Mixtur-Trautonium to create the birdcalls and noises. He had first encountered this predecessor to the synthesizer on Berlin radio in the late 1920s. It was invented by Friedrich Trautwein and further developed by Oskar Sala into the Trautonium, which would create some of the bird sounds for this film.[17][18][19]
The director commissioned Sala and Remi Gassmann to design an electronic soundtrack.[16] They are credited with "electronic sound production and composition", and Hitchcock's previous musical collaborator Bernard Herrmann is credited as "sound consultant".
Source music includes the first of Claude Debussy's Deux arabesques, which Tippi Hedren's character plays on piano, and "Risseldy Rosseldy", an Americanized version[20] of the Scottish folk song "Wee Cooper O'Fife", which is sung by the schoolchildren.
Special effects[edit]
The special effects shots of the attacking birds were done at Walt Disney Studios by animator/technician Ub Iwerks, who used the sodium vapor process ("yellow screen") which he had helped to develop. The SV process films the subject against a screen lit with narrow-spectrum sodium vapor lights. Unlike most compositing processes, SVP actually shoots two separate elements of the footage simultaneously using a beam-splitter. one reel is regular film stock and the other a film stock with emulsion sensitive only to the sodium vapor wavelength. This results in very precise matte shots compared to blue screen special effects, necessary due to "fringing" of the image from the birds' rapid wing flapping.[21]
Premiere and awards[edit]
The film premiered March 28, 1963 in New York City. The Museum of Modern Art hosted an invitation-only screening of it as part of a 50-film retrospective of Hitchcock's film work. The MOMA series had a booklet with a monograph on him written by Peter Bogdanovich. The film was screened out of competition in May at a prestigious invitational showing at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival[22] with Hitchcock and Hedren in attendance.
Ub Iwerks was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Special Effects. The winner that year was Cleopatra. Tippi Hedren received the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year – Actress in 1964, sharing it with Ursula Andress and Elke Sommer. She also received the Photoplay Award as Most Promising Newcomer. The film ranked #1 of the top 10 foreign films selected by the Bengal Film Journalists' Association Awards. Hitchcock also received the Association's Director Award for the film.[23]
It also won the Horror Hall of Fame Award in 1991.[24]
Reception and interpretation[edit]
The film received a Rotten Tomatoes approval rating of 96%, with the consensus: "Proving once again that build-up is the key to suspense, Hitchcock successfully turned birds into some of the most terrifying villains in horror history."[25] The eminent film critic David Thomson refers to it as Hitchcock's "last unflawed film".[26]
Humanities scholar Camille Paglia wrote a monograph about the film for the BFI Film Classics series. She interprets it as an ode to the many facets of female sexuality and, by extension, nature itself. She notes that women play pivotal roles in it. Mitch is defined by his relationships with his mother, sister, and ex-lover – a careful balance which is disrupted by his attraction to the beautiful Melanie.[27]
The film was honored by the American Film Institute as the seventh greatest thriller and Bravo awarded it the 96th spot on their "The 100 Scariest Movie Moments" for the scene when the birds attack the town.[28]
- American Film Institute nominations
- AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies[29]
- AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes & Villains
- Birds (Villains)[30] Nominated
- AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition)[31]
Sequel and remake[edit]
An unrelated sequel, The Birds II: Land's End, was released in 1994, with different actors. It was a direct-to-television film and received negative reviews. Its director, Rick Rosenthal, removed his name from it, opting to use the Hollywood pseudonym Alan Smithee.[32] Hedren appeared in it in a supporting role, but not as her original character.
In 2007, Variety reported that Naomi Watts would star in Universal's remake of the film, which would be directed by Casino Royale director Martin Campbell. The production would be a joint venture by Platinum Dunes and Mandalay Pictures.[33] Hedren stated her opposition to the remake, saying, "Why would you do that? Why? I mean, can’t we find new stories, new things to do?"[34] Development has been stalled since the 2007 announcement. on 16 June 2009, Brad Fuller of Dimension Films stated that no further developments had taken place, commenting, "We keep trying, but I don't know."[35] Martin Campbell was eventually replaced as director by Dennis Iliadis in December 2009.[36][37]
Several shooting scenes from the film are reenacted in The Girl, a 2012 HBO/BBC film that gives a version of the relationship between Hitchcock and Hedren.
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