***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren, Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleshette, and Veronica Cartwright
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock & written for the screen by Evan Hunter, from the story by Daphne Du Maurier
1963
119 min PG
I’ve racked my brain trying to connect the two halves of “The Birds,” and I can’t. Maybe that’s the point. The movie begins with a platinum blonde prankster, with issues of her own, stumbling onto the bottled-up domestic situation of a small town lawyer and his family. And then the birds attack, without provocation, without explanation, as inexplicably as a nightmare. If there’s a direct thematic correlation between the two sections, I can’t find it. But I think “The Birds” gains its eerie strength from having a myriad of explanations that kind-of, sort-of, half-fit the facts. Is the domestic struggle of the lawyer’s family inadvertently summoning the bird attacks, a la “Forbidden Planet?” Is the panicky bystander right when she blurts out that the blonde is cursed and has brought the birds with her? Is the movie a misogynist parable of the solitary man whipping himself into shape to save three helpless women? What I’m reluctant to believe is that there’s no connection. I don’t want to believe that Hitchcock is throwing the end of the world into sharper relief by making it have absolutely nothing to do with what was going on right before it.
We begin the movie with Tippi Hedren in a San Francisco bird shop. She’s a combination of two of Hitch’s favorite types: the aloof, straitlaced, and sexually contained blonde, and the person so accustomed to power and affluence that she doesn’t think the rules apply to her. Her completely un-self-conscious impulsiveness makes her one of Hitchcock’s most interesting blondes. In the bird shop, she’s accosted by a lawyer who knows her colored past, then she immediately sets off on a weekend-long expedition to surprise him with a pair of lovebirds, without consideration for the cost, time, or all the social awkwardness involved. She constantly borrows phones, asks nosy questions without apology, rents a boat, and she never seems to acknowledge how presumptuous she is, except with the occasional look of amusement.
The lawyer’s situation is even more off-kilter. Played by Rod Taylor of the original “The Time Machine,” he may work in San Francisco, but he lives in a small town with his mother (Jessica Tandy) and eleven-year-old sister (Veronica Cartwright). Not far down the road is an old girlfriend of the lawyer’s (Suzanne Pleshette), who knows there’s no future in the relationship, but still wants to be near the lawyer and has taken a job as a schoolteacher. Mommy, as is typical of Hitchcock, is a control-freak, trying to keep her son at home, while the schoolteacher’s adult development is equally stunted.
And then, like I said, one-by-one, the birds attack. Are they enacting the rivalry that Tippi and the schoolteacher are unable to express? Are the humans and the birds being reversed, who is caged and who is freed? Is the savagery of the bird attacks causing the stifled family situation to revert to a more traditional arrangement in which the man (the lawyer) is out from under his weakened mother, tosses aside the inferior woman (the schoolteacher), and can finally claim his woman (Tippi), changing her from a shrew into a properly silent and submissive wife?
The bird attacks are all done expertly, to be sure, and there’s lot of fun to be had in just watching the birds regroup, rest, and otherwise wait ominously. Even if some of the effects haven’t held up, they still maintain an eerie contrivance. The sound effects are even better, as all the squawking and cawing degenerates into unearthly shrieks. There is no music, but Hitchcock’s longtime musical collaborator Bernard Hermann was brought in as a consultant about where and when the chirps, caws, and flapping are the most unnerving. Tippi, Tandy, and Pleshette, as the three adult women vying for the lawyer’s attention, are all good, while Taylor is at best competent as an all-American, B-movie square jaw (toward the end of his career, Hitchcock really missed Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart). A young Veronica Cartwright, playing much the same role she would play sixteen years later in “Alien,” is also nothing special, but more of a generic, blurty, Disney-style child actress.
Maybe I’m thinking too hard. Maybe “The Birds” is a vision of the end of the world, pure and simple, not in bombs and nukes and split atoms, as was the tendency of the ‘50s and ‘60s, but in the rebellion of something ordinary, something we take for granted, turning violent. As we move from San Francisco to the final shots of Bodega Bay, the images and lighting become increasingly surreal, until we watch the lawyer’s family, shot wildly from below, before stepping into a bizarre, raven-and-gull coated landscape, with ethereal blades of sunlight cutting from the clouds above. Creepy stuff.
Finished Sunday, July 24th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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