The Birds (1963)

...And remember, the next scream you hear could be your own!

A wealthy San Francisco socialite pursues a potential boyfriend to a small Northern California town that slowly takes a turn for the bizarre when birds of all kinds suddenly begin to attack people there in increasing numbers and with increasing viciousness. 

The Birds is a 1963 suspense/horror film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, loosely based on the 1952 story "The Birds" by Daphne du Maurier.  It starred Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren, Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleshette and a young Veronica Cartwright.  The screenplay was written by Evan Hunter.


The film is considered on the best thrillers of all time.  It was honored by the American Film Institute as the seventh greatest thriller and Bravo awarded it the 96th spot on their "The 100 Scariest Movie Moments" for the scene when the birds attack the city.  Ub Iwerks was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Special Effects.  Tippi Hedren received the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year – Actress in 1964, sharing it with Ursula Andress and Elke Sommer. She also received the Photoplay Award as Most Promising Newcomer. The film ranked #1 of the top 10 foreign films selected by the Bengal Film Journalists' Association Awards. Hitchcock also received the Association's Director Award for the film.

The birds attack

 The film begins in San Francisco where Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) meets handsome criminal lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor).  After a less than pleasant first meeting, Melanie decides to follow Mitch out to his hometown fishing community. She is apparently rather smitten with young Mitch.  But the day Melanie arrives for some inexplicable reason the birds start attacking people.  The local school teacher is Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette) who followed Mitch here to be close to him but when their relationship ended she just stayed to be near him as a friend.  If you believe that then I have the Brooklyn Bridge for sale if you're interested.  This creates a rather strange love triangle as an underlying plot.  There is also the strange relationship with Mitch's mother who is not very fond of any of the girls he brings home.

This is one of Hitchcock's most well-known movies. Along with Psycho, it's the movie that most people identify with him.  The plot of "The Birds" could be considered quite ridiculous.  The first 40 minutes of the film have zero horror elements and sets up what could be a horrible love story.  Hitchcock spends this part of the movie developing the characters and installing their situation in the viewers' minds.  And the suspense he build with these birds...shit.  You watch the birds just sitting there, and they do not move, they are just waiting. Even when you think they are dumb as shit something tells you they are thinking. They are analyzing your every move.

They sit and they wait.....

The scene when the four people are trapped inside the house with the birds waiting outside is classic.  This has to be one of the main influences on George Romero and his film "Night Of The Living Dead."  They were trapped in the old abandoned farm house much as our characters are here.  The absence of backgound music added a sense of calm before the storm which made the bird attack scenes all the more intense. In my opinion the most chilling scene was definitely when Melanie was waiting outside the school while the singing was going on inside the school. At each loop of the song, a few more crows would perch outside.  Just my writing about it doesn't do it justice.  It's just plain fucking creepy.

The special effects were amazing for a film from 1963.  When Hitchcock was asked how he got the birds to attack he jokes, "They were well paid."  The detailed camera angles that Hitchcock put into the film were impressive. Many directors shoot scenes in a boring manner, but not Hitchcock.

The birds obviously didn't like that singing.

 I love the mysterious way the film ends with no explanation or dialogue. The sea of birds seem to permit their departure, even though the fowls could easily stop them if they wanted.  We never get an explanation as to why the birds are attacking and this leads some to point that out as a reason that they don't like the film.  Don't listen to them....they probably flip burgers at McDonalds.  If you need grilling advice then give them a listen, otherwise see this film.  It's a classic, a masterpiece and one of the best of all time. It's a perfect example of why Alfred Hitchcock is considered, "The Master of Suspense".

Trivia:  
Tippi Hedren was actually cut in the face by a bird in one of the shots.  

Rod Taylor claims that the seagulls were fed a mixture of wheat and whiskey. It was the only way to get them to stand around so much.

When audiences left the film's UK premiere at the Odeon, Leicester Square, London, they were greeted by the sound of screeching and flapping birds from loudspeakers hidden in the trees to scare them further. 

Alfred Hitchcock approached Joseph Stefano (screenwriter of Psycho) to write the script, but he wasn't interested in the story. The final screenplay (from a Daphne Du Maurier short story) was written by Evan Hunter, best known to detective-story fans under the pen name Ed McBain.

Alfred Hitchcock saw Tippi Hedren in a 1962 commercial aired during the Today show and put her under contract. In the commercial for a diet drink, she is seen walking down a street and a man whistles at her slim, attractive figure, and she turns her head with an acknowledging smile. In the opening scene of the film, the same thing happens as she walks toward the bird shop. This was an inside joke by Hitchcock. 
 
Tippi Hedren's daughter Melanie Griffith was given a present by Alfred Hitchcock during the filming: a doll that looked exactly like Hedren, eerily so. The creepiness was compounded by the ornate wooden box it came in, which the young girl took to be a coffin.

 
 The automobile driven by Tippi Hedren is an Aston Martin DB2/4 drop-head coupe.

The movie features 370 effects shots. The final shot is a composite of 32 separately filmed elements.

In the film, it appears as if the schoolhouse is within the bay town limits. The frightened children are clearly shown running downhill toward the town and the water. In real life, the schoolhouse used for those shots is located five miles southeast and inland of Bodega Bay in the separate township of Bodega, California.

The crow that sits on Alfred Hitchcock's shoulder in all of the promo photos was not in the movie. It was purchased after the movie had wrapped. A studio staff member bought it when he spotted the tamed bird on the shoulder of a 12-year-old boy walking down the street. The boy was offered about $10 but was hesitant until he discovered why it was needed. 

This was the first film to carry the Universal Pictures name after dropping the Universal-International name.

Mitch Zanich, owner of the Tides Restaurant at the time of shooting, told Hitchcock he could shoot there if the lead male in the film was named after him, and Hitch gave him a speaking part in the movie. Hitchcock agreed: Rod Taylor's character was named Mitch Brenner, and Mitch Zanich was given a speaking part. After Melanie is attacked by a seagull, Mitch Zanich can be heard saying to Mitch Brenner, "What happened, Mitch?"

When the film was aired on NBC-TV in the USA on 6 January 1968, it became the highest rated film shown on television up to that time. The record held until Love Story overtook it on 1 October 1972.

 The classic scene in which Tippi Hedren watches birds attacking the townsfolk was filmed in the studio from a phone booth. When Melanie opens the phone-booth door, a bird trainer had trained gulls that were taught to fly at it. Surviving photos of the shooting of the scene were published in the book "Hitchcock at Work" by Bill Krohn.

In one of the first scenes, Tippi Hedren can be seen crossing the street to the pet shop. As she does, she disappears behind a sign for a moment and reappears on the other side. Alfred Hitchcock so hated working on location that he used this moment to seamlessly cut to a studio shot.

The sound of reel-to-reel tape being run backward and forward was used to help create the frightening bird squawking sounds in the film

Melanie wears the same green suit throughout the movie, so Tippi Hedren was provided with six identical green suits for the shoot.

 A scene in the film shows a service station where a bird knocks over an attendant filling a car with gas. The gas flows across the street where a man lights his cigarette igniting the gas. The fire follows the gas stream to the pump and explodes. The service station was located across from "The Tides" restaurant and pier. In reality this service station did not exist at the time of the filming. However, several years later a service station was built and is still located at the spot shown in the film.

Voted seventh-scariest movie of all time by a poll carried out on the British public by Channel 5 and "The Times" in 2006.

Cast member Doodles Weaver was the uncle of actress Sigourney Weaver, who worked with Veronica Cartwright in Alien, and with Tippi Hedren's daughter, Melanie Griffith, in Working Girl. 

 The schoolhouse, in Bodega Bay, California, has also been known to be haunted, even back during the filming. According to Tippi Hedren, the entire cast was spooked to be there. She also mentioned how she had the feeling, while there, that "the building was immensely populated... but there was nobody there." When Hitchcock was told about the schoolhouse being haunted, according to Hedren, he was even more encouraged to film there.

Tippi Hedren was required to really slap Doreen Lang, who played the hysterical mother that called Melanie "evil." Hedren was hesitant, having never slapped anyone before, but Lang convinced her to do it. 

One of the little girls at Cathy's birthday party (at the very end of the 'attack' scene , she was standing alongside another girl....holding her cheek) was played by Suzanne Cupito. She later changed to her stage name, Morgan Brittany. Dallas fans may remember her as Pamela Ewing's evil half-sister, Katherine Wentworth.

The scene where Tippi Hedren is ravaged by birds near the end of the movie took a week to shoot. The birds were attached to her clothes by long nylon threads so they could not get away.

The film does not finish with the usual "THE END" title because Alfred Hitchcock wanted to give the impression of unending terror.

Near the end of the film, when Mitch carries Melanie down the stairs, it is actually Tippi Hedren's stand-in being carried by Rod Taylor. Hedren was in the hospital recovering from exhaustion after a week of shooting the scene where Melanie is trapped in the upstairs room with the birds.

A number of endings were being considered for this film. One that was considered would have showed the Golden Gate Bridge completely covered by birds.

In the end, when Melanie is carried outside, Mitch opens a door. There was no door used in filming, and it was all done with light effects to make it look as if Mitch opened the front door.

 For the scene in which Annie is killed, Suzanne Pleshette who played her told Alfred Hitchcock it would look good if her ear was all bloody and hanging off, so he sent her to the prop department. When it came to shooting the scene, Hitchcock had Annie facing the other way, so the viewer never sees the ear, which Pleshette recalled "was part of his delicious sense of humor."

Before filming the final attack scene when Melanie goes upstairs, Tippi Hedren asked Alfred Hitchcock , "Hitch, why would I do this?" Hitchcock's response was, "Because I tell you to."

When the children are running down the street from the schoolhouse, extra footage was shot back on the Universal sound stages to make the scene more terrifying. A few of the children were brought back and put in front of a process screen on a treadmill. They would run in front of the screen on the treadmill with the Bodega Bay footage behind them while a combination of real and fake crows were attacking them. There were three rows of children and when the treadmill was brought up to speed it ran very fast. On a couple of occasions during the shoot, a number of the children in the front fell and caused the children in back to fall as well. It was a very difficult scene to shoot and took a number of days to get it right. The birds used were hand puppets, mechanical and a couple were trained live birds.

Hitchcock's film and the original story by Daphne Du Maurier share no characters and in fact have only in common the bay-side town setting, the bird's bizarre behavior and their inexplicable tendency to launch frenzied attacks, fall dormant only to attack again later. In Du Maurier's story the main character discovers that this pattern is directly related to the rise and fall of the tides and uses this to their advantage, as opposed to the film which seems to follow the same pattern but never makes a direct connection. Also the original story takes place in Britain and centers around a man protecting his wife and two children at their isolated cottage home, as opposed to the film which centers on the spirited but troubled city dweller Melanie Daniels who travels to the California coast on a whim.