The Birds

Composite Score: 84.93

Starring: Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren, Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleshette, Veronica Cartwright, Ethel Griffies, Charles McGraw, Ruth McDevitt, and Lonny Chapman

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Writer: Evan Hunter

Genres: Drama, Horror, Mystery, Romance

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Box Office: $53,652 worldwide

Why should you Watch This Film?

                The Birds is Alfred Hitchcock’s film that loosely adapts Daphne Du Maurier’s short story of the same title. The film follows San Francisco socialite Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) as she follows a potential new boyfriend – Rod Taylor’s Mitch Brenner – to his hometown of Bodega Bay about an hour up the coast from San Fran. Her exploration of the small town and its residents soon devolves into a fight for survival as the local birds begin attacking in packs anyone caught out in the open. The film has been celebrated as one of Hitchcock’s best horror films and even garnered an Oscar nomination for its visual effects. It stands the test of time thanks to its observations of humanity in crisis and particularly its emphasis on the reduction of our personal squabbles in favor of mutual survival in those types of situations.

Why shouldn’t you Watch This Film?

                The Birds has an issue that I’ve noticed in a few of Hitchcock’s films, in that he uses the first act to introduce the audience to a plethora of interesting themes and story threads before discarding them all in the second act in favor of the horror narrative and passing that off as some kind of plot twist. In this particular film, the opening act plays like an Oedipal and class-focused romantic drama with Hedren’s socialite protagonist starting to fall for an out-of-town lawyer with mommy issues and a jilted ex who’s never quite stopped carrying a torch for him. It offers the makings of a fascinating film that then devolves into the fight for survival against the swarms of birds that is the entire back half of the film. Threads and themes are abandoned to make way for scenes of carnage, seemingly senseless deaths, and an increasing sense of dread as the attacks ramp up. It still makes for a fun film, and the abandonment of the initial story offers an interesting commentary on human nature, but it’s still a bit disappointing to leave all of that potential just out there without exploring it at all in the film’s final act.

So wait, why should you Watch This Film?

                The Birds gives audiences a glimpse of a genre that has yet to be fully realized again – elevated disaster/horror films. It features an unexplained act of nature pushing humans to the extent of their wits to survive. While later films like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno offered bigger fare with more bombastic effects, The Birds is the film that captures the desperation of humanity in such situations like none other. The disaster movies of the 90s – Twister, Dante’s Peak, Armageddon, Independence Day, etc. – utilize star power and improved effects technology to tell more emotional stories, perhaps, but none of them quite hit the notes of anxiety that Hitchcock delivers in the final thirty minutes of the film. Perhaps Cloverfield (2008) is the film that comes closest to matching The Birds in terms of horror/disaster combination, but its characters never feel complex enough to match the compelling cast of characters in The Birds. Hitchcock’s film succeeds in this point with its opening act that, though abandoned in terms of story thread and themes, attaches the audience to the characters by putting them in situations not normally seen in other horror or disaster films. By giving us something more than your typical tropes, Hitchcock prepares the audience to continue caring about the characters once survival becomes their only motivation.

                Though it has spawned many attempted successors, no film has quite hit the blend of drama, horror, and disaster like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds does, and for that, it earns a place among the Greatest Films of All Time. Though most of its more compelling story points end up abandoned in favor of its survival narrative, those lost moments work to keep the audience glued to the screen as the birds do what they do throughout the film. This film is currently available to stream via Peacock Premium for anyone who would like to check it out in the near future.