THE BIRDS
Wheeeeee! Lesbian tension!
I don't know what it is about Hitchcock. For some reason, his movies tend to take forever to get going to where we all know they're going, but they're eminently fascinating to watch all the way through anyway. Maybe it's because I'm just staring, jaw dropped, at Grace Kelley or Tippi Hedren or whoever happens to be the heroine. I mean, wow.
It's a good fifty minutes in this movie until we get a half-decent bird attack (one bird nipping on Tippi's head doesn't count), and it's still well worth it. I don't really know why. The characters, while charismatically played, aren't anything special, for the most part. Veronica Cartwright plays exactly the same role she would 16 years later in Alien (and every other damn role she ever played), with a lot of sobbing. And I was rather distracted by how close in age appeared the "mother-son" duo of Jessica Tandy and Rod Taylor (quick look at the IMDb, they're 21 years apart. Well, Rod looked old, and Jessica hardly looked like she was forty-five, let alone fifty-four. And the effects are largely really dated. I mean, some of them were great, but others, like the transparent birds...
And yet, this movie kicked some ass. It didn't just kick some ass, it kicked mammalian bipedal ass.
The intro was hilarious, and I could completely relate. I once worked in a pet store and had to make up answers to half the questions I got, so little was my understanding of the place. (hey, I was sent there. Not my fault.) Much of the movie was tense as hell too. One can see the clear influence this one had on Night Of The Living Dead. The creepiest scene is at the end where they're shuffling slowly through the porch and driveway filled with birds, and one point in the birds' siege of the house where the camera work strongly suggests that they're gonna come punching through the ceiling, and you're watching it with clenched teeth and cringing eyes......man, it was pure joy. What a great little movie.
Oh yeah - about that lesbian tension. Every single scene where Tippi Hedren (Schwing!) and Suzanne Plechette (Boing!) were together, I almost thought they were gonna reach out and grope each other. I don't really know why, but I kept hoping against hope, knowing it would all be for naught...but still, a guy can dream, right?