New York Times (01/Apr/1963) - 'The Birds': Hitchcock's Feathered Fiends are Chilling
(c) The New York Times (01/Apr/1963)
- http://www.nytimes.com/library/film/040163hitch-birds-review.html
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Jessica Tandy, Rod Taylor, San Francisco, California, Suzanne Pleshette, The Birds (1963), Tippi Hedren
The Birds: Hitchcock's Feathered Fiends are Chilling
Take in the bird-bath and feeder! Beware the first robin of spring! A threat of unspeakable horror is latent in our feathered friends! At least, that is what Alfred Hitchcock is implying in his new film, "The Birds," which is whirring and screeching with deafening uproar at the Palace and Sutton Theaters.
Making a terrifying menace out of what is assumed to be one of nature's most innocent creatures and one of man's most melodious friends, Mr. Hitchcock and his associates have constructed a horror film that should raise the hackles of the most courageous and put goose-pimples on the toughest hide.
Whether Mr. Hitchcock intended this picture of how a plague of birds almost ruins a peaceful community to be symbolic of how the world might be destroyed (or perilously menaced) by a sudden disorder of nature's machinery is not apparent in the picture. Nor is it made readily clear whether he meant the birds to represent the classical Furies that were supposed to pursue the wicked on this earth.
I prefer to suspect the latter, although it isn't in Mr. Hitchcock's style to inject allegorical meanings or social significance in his films. But the context of the birds concentrating their fury upon a house in which a possessive and jealous mother hovers anxiously over her son is so obvious and fascinating that I rather lean to it.
There is also this further indication: a young woman who is made out to be the vaguely resentful ex-sweetheart of the son is killed by the birds in one of their onsets before they zero in on the mother's house. Evidently this young woman has been ridden with jealousy, too.
But whether or not it is intended that you should find significance in this film, it is sufficiently equipped with other elements to make the senses reel. Mr. Hitchcock, as is his fashion, has constructed it beautifully, so that the emotions are carefully worked up to the point where they can be slugged.
He begins, innocently, with a haughty San Francisco girl having a testy encounter in a bird shop with a man on whom she plays a practical joke. Then, mischievously, he leads her to the fellow's family home in a fishing village north of San Francisco to deliver an impudent present of two love-birds.
Notice how clear and naturalistic the narrative elements are: a plausible confrontation, beautiful scenery, a literal enactment of a playful intrigue -- all very nicely arranged.
Then, sneakily, Mr. Hitchcock tweaks us with a tentative touch of the bizarre. The plausible is interrupted by a peculiar avian caprice. A seagull attacks a young woman. Flocks of angry gulls whirl in the air. A swarm of sparrows swoops down a chimney and whirrs madly through the living room. And, then, before we know it, he is flying in shock waves of birds and the wild, mad, fantastic encounter with a phenomenon of nature is on.
There may be no explanation for it (except that symbolic one, perhaps), but the fierceness and frightfulness of it are sufficient to cause shocks and chills. And that is, no doubt, what Mr. Hitchcock primarily intends.
The cast is appropriate and sufficient to this melodramatic intent. Tippi Hedren is pretty, bland and wholesome as the disruptive girl. Rod Taylor is stolid and sturdy as the mother-smothered son. Jessica Tandy is querulous as the mother, and pretty Suzanne Pleshette is pleasant but vaguely sinister as the old girl friend.
There are the usual Hitchcock "characters" spotted throughout the film. And those birds! Well, you've never seen such actors! They are amazingly malevolent feathered friends.
