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The Independent (15/Sep/2006) - Film: Story of the scene, The Birds

(c) The Independent (15/Sep/2006)


FILM: STORY OF THE SCENE

"THE BIRDS" Alfred Hitchcock (1963)

The climactic sequence of The Birds takes place in the attic of a Bodega Bay house where Tippi Hedren takes the full brunt of thousands of wild birds as they begin a terrifying attack. The scene has been highly influential in the horror genre and led directly to the premise of Night of the Living Dead.

Hedren was the director's latest discovery - one in a long line of icy blondes that he liked to use and abuse onscreen. She plays the shallow socialite Melanie Daniels, who encounters a young lawyer, Mitch Brenner, in a San Francisco pet shop. Stung by his sarcastic remarks, she tracks him down to Bodega Bay where she gives him some caged lovebirds and stays with a schoolteacher, Annie Hayworth. Soon after, seagulls and other birds start to attack people. She moves in with the Brenners at their farm, and the windows are boarded up as the birds mass outside. But they find a way in, and Hedren, upstairs in an attic bedroom, undergoes a savage assault.

It wasn't supposed to be Hedren in the attic - the schoolteacher (played by Suzanne Pleshette) was the original victim in the first drafts. There were no trick shots in the scene - in a film absolutely packed with them - yet it took a week to film and Hedren had to endure having live seagulls thrown at her and tied to her arms and legs. "Such a drawn-out and dangerous ordeal for an actress may have no precedent since D W Griffith spent weeks shooting the ice-floe climax of Way Down East [1920] - when Lillian Gish was forced to request a stand-in and the latter came away with permanent injuries," writes Ken Mogg in "The Alfred Hitchcock Story".

The scriptwriter Evan Hunter (later embittered by his treatment at the hands of Hitchcock) had not designed it to play as a major scene, but the script was amended by Hitchcock himself, with uncredited help from the writer VS Pritchett. Much of its effectiveness is not just the obvious distress of Hedren, but in Hitchcock's clever use of the slicing sound of the birds' wings (elsewhere he runs these natural noises through a West German synthesiser - innovative at the time).

Later in her life, a semi-retired Hedren ran an animal sanctuary, The Shambala Refuge in California, dedicated to the natural enemies of birds - cats. "Perhaps Tippi Hedren's most unique endeavour is being 'den mother' and close friend to 60-odd big cats," glows the website. At least she's safe now.