The Birds (1963, Alfred Hitchcock) (Patreon)

82/100

Hadn't seen this or read anything about it for at least 25 years, so refresh my memory, fellow old-timers: Wasn't Hedren's performance once widely considered subpar, inadequate—a significant liability that even ardent Hitchlikers (as I've just this second "cleverly" dubbed his fans) insist that the film successfully overcomes? That's what I dimly recall, and a quick poke-'round does turn up evidence of that opinion, e.g. Dave Kehr noting (decades ago, I believe) that "Tippi Hedren's lead performance is still open to controversy, but her evident stage fright is put to sublimely Hitchcockian uses." Gotta say, that stage fright was not evident to me. At all. On the contrary, she seems almost preternaturally self-possessed, as if playing a god who's taken human form just to fuck with people's heads. Melanie Daniels is basically entitlement incarnate—a lesser film would have made the birds her comeuppance, which I'll get to in a moment—and Hedren just eats the role alive, creating the impression of someone who's theoretically imperious but doesn't think that presenting as such merits the required energy. I adored every almost-but-not-quite-hissable moment that she's onscreen, and do think it telling that Melanie gets reduced to a silent stupor in the last few minutes, even if that doesn't really register as karmic payback (except perhaps from Hitch himself).

What's truly fascinating/gratifying/frustrating about The Birds is its stubborn refusal to mean anything. That's not the same thing as being thematically ambiguous, though obviously there's overlap. Some movies, like Dogville, offer a bunch of potential interpretative frameworks and invite you to pick the one you like best. The Birds offers jack shit. There's exactly one point at which it feels like a particular attack (the sparrows coming down the chimney) is maybe sorta kinda suggesting a psychosexual freakout à la Cat People (either version, I guess), with Hedren responding in a way that arguably looks more orgasmic than terrified. But that's just a single isolated moment, just as there's zero followup to one Bodega Bay resident's effort to scapegoat Melanie, accusing her of having brought the nightmare with her. (Quick aside: Hitchcock's showy setpieces get all the well-deserved attention, but check out how expertly he stages that lengthy diner scene—how each new setup, even within a cramped, crowded space, pushes the action forward and creates a sense of momentum. Awe-inspiring.) Ultimately, there's no moral here, no credible metaphor. The birds just attack. Makes perfect sense, really, now that we know that they're dinosaurs. 

To me, that's at once thrilling and slightly unsatisfying. On the one hand, I'm always up for a movie that abruptly and unexpectedly switches genres; watching that slow-burn first hour, I couldn't help but think of Audition, and marvel at how The Birds, too, could have continued in its original, seemingly innocuous vein (eliding the fleeting ominous hints in both cases) and still potentially have been terrific. On the other hand, Audition is a flat-out masterpiece, in my opinion, because of the way that its horror both derives from and retroactively reconfigures its gentle Ozu-lite romance. That doesn't happen here, and I do feel as if the film would be even stronger if it did, as much as I admire the no-fucks-given approach we actually get. Homicidal birds invading what had appeared to be a Philip Barry homage is wonderfully perverse—I especially love how much Hedren and Tandy resemble each other; all the elements for that hypothetical, interrupted melodrama are in place—but perversity has its limitations.

So much for analyzing the sizzle. As for the steak: I think it's possible to appreciate what Hitchcock achieved while also acknowledging that Hollywood wasn't yet quite capable of pulling off certain aspects of this particular conceit. Read up a little on the compositing and was stunned to learn that The Birds employed a method—the sodium vapor process—so delicate that only one camera in the world was ever equipped for it, because Disney never succeeded in making another beam-splitting prism that worked. That's just nuts. Anyway, the trickier attacks, e.g. crows vs. schoolchildren, do have a bit of a Birdemic feel—not remotely that awful, of course, but you have to make the same mental allowance required by that era's driving shots in which vehicle and road were clearly never actually introduced. I don't fault the film for that, but neither do I pretend that I don't see it. Doesn't matter, in any case, because Hitch has already shredded your every nerve with the magnificent prelude to that attack. Decades later, I vividly remembered the gradual accumulation of crows on the jungle gym or whatever that is behind Melanie, and even the way that she spots one particular bird in flight and anxiously follows its path until it lands, revealing that the total number of crows has escalated from nine to approximately 400 since we last checked in. But I'd totally forgotten that the kids sing that maddening "Risseldy Rosseldy" song throughout the entire sequence, and how much that contributes to the slowly building tension. Who needs state-of-the-next-century's-art special effects when you've got sheer genius?