The Times (29/Aug/1963) - The Birds: Mr Hitchcock goes the subtle way to make us afraid
(c) The Times (29/Aug/1962)
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Daphne du Maurier, Evan Hunter, Leicester Square, London, Psycho (1960), Rod Taylor, San Francisco, California, The Birds (1963), The Trouble with Harry (1955), Tippi Hedren, Vertigo (1958)
Mr. Hitchcock Goes the Subtle Way to Make Us Afraid
From Our Film Critic Odeon, Leicester Square: The Birds
Mr. Alfred Hitchcock seldom fails to pull a surprise out of his sleeve, and his latest film is no exception. "The Birds is coming!" scream the posters, and evil-looking black silhouettes hang over us; "It could be the most terrifying motion picture I have ever made", Mr. Hitchcock warns us (with characteristic ambiguity) from hoardings. So, naturally, we go along prepared at once to be scared out of our wits. And what happens? For the first three-quarters of an hour, virtually nothing. In his most insolently insidious fashion Mr. Hitchcock begins with throwaway social comedy shading little by little into drama. A young lawyer and an elegant San Francisco socialite meet by chance in the bird department of a pet shop. He pretends to take her for an assistant, she sets out to play a practical joke on him, and a characteristic boy-meets-girl, boy-hates-girl, but-it-all-comes-right-in-the-end pattern is established. It is all very cool, and precise, and leisurely. And so it goes on for exactly 45 minutes. We know these people, from films and from life; we know where we are, and can prepare with reasonable equanimity for a fairly conventional thriller with, presumably, science-fiction touches.
Then the birds come. First one, a stray seagull which for no apparent reason swoops out of a clear blue sky and pecks the heroine. Then other little attacks here and there. Then suddenly a sort of collective frenzy which all at once seizes great flocks of otherwise harmless birds — the sort of birds one disregards and walks happily among on the pavements of any city in the world — and sets them tearing and clawing at a humanity totally unprepared for any such betrayal. For betrayal it seems. We are used to supposing that nature is there for us; "man superior walks Amid the glad creation" and mere animals and plants know their places. But how fragile is the structure of our complacency; what would happen if something went wrong and the balance of power we so casually take on trust were changed overnight ?
This is the theme of The Birds, and it is in general brilliantly handled. The old master's skill in starting from the ordinary only to drop us terrifyingly into the extraordinary has seldom been better deployed. No traditional menace is allowed to intrude; there are none of the birds that normally frighten us, no suggestion that these birds have somehow acquired superior intelligence or are the agents of a superior intelligence. They are throughout just birds, ordinary birds, behaving as birds might given the one basic, by no means incredible assumption that something — some form of rabies, perhaps — might sweep,through them rather as myxomatosis did the rabbit population of the world. Once one accepts the possibility of this, all the rest falls into place as a cunningly unanswerable morality; the mushroom-shaped cloud may be the least of our troubles — that at least is part of our own house and we can, if we will, keep it in order; rather, we should remember that we occupy that house only on sufferance.
The conception of the film, then, is compelling. What prevents it nevertheless from matching the most extraordinary of Mr. Hitchcock's achievements — Psycho, Vertigo, The Trouble with Harry — is an occasional faltering in the execution. Though a lot of the process work needed to show the birds attacking is superbly done, there are odd shots which look so patently fake that they weaken our confidence in the whole. Then the cast seems, in comparison with those Mr. Hitchcock has lately been assembling, a trifle colourless: Mr. Rod Taylor's lawyer hero is rather a dull stick and Miss "Tippi" Hedren, another of those cool-but-sizzling-underneath blondes that Mr. Hitchcock delights to feature in his films, is less appealing than many: one takes the point that she is not meant to be a very agreeable character, but at least the qualities she does have might come over more vividly. And finally the script (by Mr. Evan Hunter, vaguely suggested by a story of Miss Daphne du Maurier) does lie a little heavy, especially towards the end of the first movement, when all the characters spend too much time unilluminatingly discussing their relations with their own and each other's mothers.
But when all this is said, second-grade Hitchcock is still about twice as exciting as first-grade anyone else. There are marvellous ideas (like the irony of the heroine fluttering frantically, "caged" in a phone-booth by savage, blood-lusting birds) and always the sheer drive and discipline of his visual story-telling. And, to come back to the basics which still mean most to the average filmgoer when the name of Mr. Hitchcock is mentioned, it can be safely guaranteed to make even the most stout-hearted think twice the next time he starts casually to brush aside a couple of stray pigeons that cross his path.