Movies - The Birds

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	Movies - The Birds

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.)

Synopsis

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.

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