There are quite few Hitchcocks I've not yet seen, and it's usually by choice (Marnie, Torn Curtain, Topaz, Family Plot, all but one of the silents) but this was an odd gap in my viewing - until now! Verdict: effectively tense despite occasional unintentionally funny moments, not all of which are because of bad bird FX. I expected to hate Tippi Hedren, but I actually thought she was very good and carries the movie well, despite being shoehorned into Hitchcock's usual blonde ice-vixen box. Sure, she's an ice-vixen, but she makes it work. And one good thing about her performance is that she never screams, despite ample opportunity. Rod Taylor I'm not so sure about. He's serviceable, but he looks distractingly as if someone took Robin Williams and shot a handsomizer ray at him. (A quick Google reveals that I am not the only one to whom this occurred.)
But what's sort of interesting is that he's essentially only the major male role, surrounded by women. (Even the best supporting character is this old, well, bird, who is an ornithology expert ready to poo-poo tales of bird attacks and present the birds as more sinned against by man than sinning [the basis for the "Eco-parable" interpretation of the film])
There are interpretations of this film that make him the central figure and the birds the allegory of the torrent of female feelings swirling around him, but he doesn't really do much to warrant being the Sun in this little solar system. Indeed, the whole beginning premise of the film is Tippi Hedren's Melanie Daniels driving all the way up to Bodega Bay from her home in San Francisco just to "play a joke" on Taylor's Mitch Brenner. This is putatively because she's angry at him for tricking her, but clearly she's got a crush on him, despite being a wild rich socialite to his humble lawyer. They meet in the beginning scene of the film in a pet store - she's asked the owner to make a call in the back for her and he comes in asking for a pair of lovebirds for his (11-year-old - it's never explained why there's such an age difference, as he looks
at least 30 ish) sister and appears to mistake her for the sales assistant. She plays along, while clearly demonstrating her lack of knowledge about the birds for sale, until he replaces an escaped canary in its cage saying "Back in your gilded cage, Melanie Daniels", thereby revealing that he knew who she was all along. He claims he did so because he watched her use her influence (her father is part-owner of a major newspaper) to get out of something in court and was offended. Anyway, he swears he really did want the lovebirds, but leaves without them. So she orders a pair and intends to leave them outside his apartment (she finds his address through her connections at the paper) with a nasty note, but his neighbor reveals that he's gone home to Bodega Bay for the weekend, and the birds won't survive. So off she goes in her fancy little sports car. There's very little hint of the carnage to come until she is attacked by a seagull, getting out of the boat she's used to steal across the bay to deliver the birds to his house (which is across the bay from the town).
He's seen her, though, and has driven to town to wait for her, so he sees the attack. (We find out later that this is not the very first attack - seagulls attacked a fishing boat earlier in the week.) Anyway, she's already met Suzanne Pleshette (most famous for being Bob Newhart's wife in his
first eponymous sitcom), who is the town schoolteacher, and decides to stay with her after Mitch invites her to dinner that night (to the evident consternation of his mother, Jessica Tandy (looking very young and beautiful, well, compared to how I think of her). Turns out Suzanne Pleshette's Ann moved to Bodega Bay following Mitch, but it didn't last, perhaps because of the mother, although they are now friends. This is the basis for the psychosexual interpretation, a rare
plausible suggestion by Camille Paglia, according to which the bird attacks happen when Melanie intrudes on Mitch's mother's control of her son. Another advantage of this interpretation is that it makes sense of an otherwise infuriating episode where, after sheltering in their boarded-up house and surviving a concerted bird attack, Melanie wakes up to hear fluttering upstairs and, without waking anyone else up, goes upstairs and opens a door. The room is of course full of birds and she is almost killed. FOR NO REASON.
But according to this interpretation, she "sacrifices herself" to break the curse that has begun when she arrived in town (except, of course, the fishing boat episode shows that it didn't). Anyway, is it a good horror film? Well, it does take a
long time to get going with the attacks, but I'm okay with that. Most good horror films take a long time establishing mood before they start the bloodbath. And, while some of the bird FX are, frankly, laughable, I do find the idea of being attacked by gulls genuinely plausible and horrifying - they could obviously do real damage. And the best scare in the film is when Jessica Tandy goes over to a neighbor's house (whose chickens, like hers, have been suspiciously off their feed) and, when he doesn't answer the door, goes into his house. The first thing she notes is that every cup hanging on his kitchen dresser has been broken. Tension mounts as she tiptoes down the hall until she finds him... dead - with his eyes plucked out.
The camera zooms in on this grisly effect, which must have been about as gory as it gets for 1963. And of course, there's the iconic scene where Melanie arrives to pick up the 11-year-old from the school and is sitting outside with her back to the climbing frame as, unseen by her, it fills up with birds.
A moment that
wasn't so effective is when everyone is sheltering in the downtown restaurant watching havoc unfold outside (a man is filling his car when he's attacked and the petrol runs to another car where a man drops his lit cigar and is enveloped in a fireball) and we see three quick stills of Hedren looking in three different directions with a variety of appalled expressions. For some reason it looks ludicrous, which I'm sure was not the intended effect. But you're not laughing any more when they find Suzanne Pleshette's body, brought down on her own doorstep. That's what you get for flying too close to the Rod Taylor Sun. I'm not sure how I feel about the ending. In one way it's good because it doesn't try to tie up loose ends - it's like the original ending for
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, before it was softened. But on the other, it's unsatisfying. Nowadays it would be a sign that a franchise was starting and there would be successively more disappointing sequels.
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