Rent The Birds (1963)

Overrated Hitchcock. Dated. - The Birds review by AP

I usually like films from legendary director Alfred Hitchcock.

His brand of suspense thrillers and technical film wizardry for the era are strongpoints. So it is with some degree of trepidation that my review of such a well known Hitchcock film is mediocre. The lowest I have rated one of his films.

I just found the build up starring the two principal actors Tippi Hedren as Socialite Melanie Daniels and Australian Rod Taylor as San Francisco lawyer Mitch Brenner...boring.

It begins with some potential romance scenario where Brenner and Taylor meet each other in a pet store before the film cuts to Daniels driving up the California coast to a resort called Bodega Bay where Taylor spends weekends with his domineering mother Lydia Brenner (Jessica Tandy).

Eventually some bird action occurs as Daniels is attacked by a rogue seagull.

Scenes are shown featuring other bird species in attack mode such as sparrows and crows.

The horror of the bird attacks look tame by modern standards but I imagine back in 1963 they caused a stir.

In one scene a dead body with no eyeballs is shown.

The film was produced way before computer effects so relies on special effects from cameras and film. They do the job adequately.

The film ends quite abruptly without providing adequate resolution in my opinion. Questions are left unanswered. Why do the birds attack the coastal town?

Does outsider to the town Daniels have some link?

Iconic Horror Thriller - The Birds review by GI

A rather quirky film in Alfred Hitchcock's canon but probably one of his most famous. It has all his usual build up of tension and dread although it does veer into romantic melodrama for much of the first third of the film. However once it gears up into the main story it is impactive, exciting and at times quite scary. Former model Tippi Hedren, one of Hitchcock's famous blonde 'discoveries', plays rich San Francisco socialite Melanie who, on a whim, heads out to the remote seaside town of Bodega Bay searching for Mitch (Rod Taylor), a man she fancies and hopes to seduce. As they begin a romance of sorts, the town is struck by strange, at first isolated, attacks by birds. These grow in intensity forcing Mitch, Melanie, his mother (Jessica Tandy) and young sister (Veronica Cartwright) to retreat to their house where they face an onslaught from the murderous birds. There's some shocking scenes but the film excels in its ability to create a contrast of calm with a sense of dread throughout, aided by there being no musical score. Hitchcock's well known hatred for location shooting means that the edits to studio shots occasionally are a little too obvious and there's too much use of back projection but that said there's equally some highly memorable stuff on display here, an overhead shot of the town from the viewpoint of the circling seagulls for example. The story offers little, if any, explanation for the sudden bird attacks unless you choose to interpret the film's constant reminder that humans keep caged birds as a possible cause of the birds behaviour, or put simply are the birds taking revenge on humans? It's open to debate in any case. This an iconic horror film and one every film fan should make sure they see, it's a film that stays in the memory for sure.