Before her tortured performance in Marnie, former model Tippi Hedren got put through the ringer in a different sort of way in The Birds. This was Alfred Hitchcock's post Psycho project, and while it might seem like a strange choice, there's no question it was an appropriate one. The picture has come under fire quite a bit for its stale lead performances and supposedly cheesy moments, but I think the criticizers are missing the point. As usual, there's something much larger at work here. The result may not be one of Hitch's best movies, and yet that certainly does not keep it from being one of his most fascinating. If Psycho probed into Hitch's obsession with women as sexual objects and creatures to be feared, The Birds carries this idea forward, minus the focus on voyeurism. Instead, he takes birds, which are relatively harmless to the human eye, and turns them into dangerous predators that attack without reason. It sounds cheesy when you hear it described, and it would be if Hitch's motive for picking birds didn't have something deeper behind it. You see, "birds" was once a term used when referring to women, so should it come as any surprise that their primary target in the picture are the children? This shares with Psycho the theory that mothers are only capable of causing harm to their offspring, whether it be mental or physical (in the case of The Birds, it's both).
It goes without question that a woman is to blame for the the birds' strange behavior. Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) is the spoiled daughter of a wealthy newspaper tycoon, her name known throughout San Francisco due to how frequently it shows up in the tabloids (she notoriously jumped into a public fountain naked). While ordering some birds at the pet shop, she's played for a fool by Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor), an attorney who has seen her in court as a result of some of her public mischief. Pissed off that he got the best of her, Melanie follows Mitch to his weekend getaway in Bodega Bay, and ends up stranded there when the birds begin their reign of terror.
Mitch's family situation is a classic Hitchcockian scenario. He lives with his pre-teen sister (Veronica Cartwright) and mother (a creepy Jessica Tandy), the latter a great reminder of why Norman Bates went insane. Every woman who comes into Mitch's life poses an immediate threat to her; despite the fact he's well into his 30s, his mother will not let him go. Throughout the picture, she's in constant paranoia that he'll abandon her. There's an unsettling scene where she explains to Melanie that she really wants to like her, but is obviously conflicted in doing so because of the anticipation of being replaced. It's enough to make one wonder if, had the The Birds been made first, Mitch could have been Norman Bates and Psycho could have served as an unofficial sequel.
The other major female character in the movie is Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette), a former flame of Mitch's who stayed in Bodega Bay just to be close to him. Upon Melanie's arrival, the jealousy is portrayed without subtlety. Annie exists for no other reason than to be an object of ridicule, as most of her scenes consist of her looking enviously at Melanie or longingly at Mitch. SPOILER It turns out she's no match for the birds either; they take her out while she's trying to protect Mitch's sister. Like most women in Hitchcock's pictures, she's ultimately disposable.
All the women are hysterical in The Birds. Melanie is full of outbursts, most of them directed at Mitch, who does nothing more than let her know what an irresponsible child she is. There's an over-the-top scene where a frightened mother freaks out on Melanie, pointing the finger at her in accusation since the birds didn't begin their rampage until she arrived. And then there's the "birds" themselves. Aside from being constant pests, they're voices are not unlike the non-stop screeching heard from the female characters.
Given what Hitch had to work with, I found the bird attacks to be rather terrifying due to their relentlessness. This is best displayed when the kids flee from the schoolhouse, making them accessible victims with no method of self defense. Equally as great is the climax as the birds try to bust into Mitch's house. What makes this sequence stand out is the scene where Melanie follows a noise upstairs, only to find that the birds have found a way in. Once in the room with them (it's a bedroom), she can't get out because every attempt to open the door is foiled by another beak forcing its way onto her body (it's probably the most disturbing rape imagery in a Hitchcock movie). Less memorable is the restaurant attack, thanks to a goofy explosion and a drunk's constant warnings about the birds signaling the end of the world.
Shortcomings aside, The Birds remains as compulsively watchable as anything else Hitch made during his golden years. By this point, his punishment of women was reaching an extreme that made me wonder how many other ways he'd find to do it in future decades. With this in mind, I came to the realization that The Birds is mirrored heavily by William Friedkin's The Exorcist. After making the connection, it's intriguing to speculate on how Hitchcock reacted to it. Was it a picture he could identify with, or was it too gruesome? You could speculate that in the early 1960s, the Master of Suspense was on his way to metamorphosing into a full blown horror director. Sadly, it's a side of his career that never got developed to its fullest potential.
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Copyright, Hell and Beyond, 2008
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