The Birds (1963)

There are very few things that are as much of a sure thing in film as a thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Movies like Psycho, Vertigo, Rear Window, and To Catch a Thief remain some of the most tautly crafted films I have seen, and 99% of this is due to the man himself. Hitch has this unusual ability to take an otherwise ordinary moment and make it more suspenseful than anything else you've ever seen.

Nowhere is this more evident than The Birds. Coming off one of his many masterpieces in Psycho, Hitchcock had pretty much free reign when it came to making thrillers and horror films. For some reason, he decided that birds out of all things were the best villain for this.

Unsurprisingly, he makes it work incredibly well. Simply a bird landing on a playground outside of a schoolhouse goes from a normal occurrence to something terrifying and suspenseful because of how this man helms this film. The Birds is a good old-school thriller, showcasing some of the genre’s best qualities in many ways and being quite ahead of its time when it comes to its use of special effects.

Let’s start with those special effects. The Birds being made in 1963 had some technical challenges to overcome with its main villain being flocks and flocks of birds; however, for its time it actually does a pretty impressive job. The countless birds flying across the screen in the film’s final moments don’t look great, sure, but they also don’t show as much age as you might think. The technology used was a more precise method than typical blue- or green-screen effects used at the time which meant that everything has a crisper look to it than it might otherwise. With birds’ feathered wings, this actually makes the film look pretty impressive even today when you realize that this is footage of actual birds superimposed over the film. No film today would attempt doing something like that and instead would probably generate them in a computer. That’s not necessarily a worse tactic, but to think about how much harder this process was makes me admire it that much more.

There’s been so much said about Hitchcock’s directing, so I’m only going to focus on one part of that in this review: his editing. The way The Birds in its most suspenseful moments has so many camera cuts that deliberately make the audience feel off-kilter is amazing, especially when you realize that few of these angles are really that different from each other. Also, there are a couple of scenes that didn’t make it into the film, which is an entirely normal occurrence for Hollywood; however, it is the nature of these scenes that make them more interesting. One adds in an explanation for a rather unexplained romance between the two leads, while the other makes the ending resolve far better than it does in the final cut. For a little while after watching the film, I struggled to realize why they were cut from the film: both would have helped The Birds feel much more typical than it is.

That’s when I realized something, though: The Birds is not designed to be typical in any way. The villains are birds, guys. Birds. Hitchcock saw it fit to diminish some of the other aspects of the film to make sure that they took the center stage and that nothing else threatened that. It worked. That’s not to say I wish some of the rest of the plot was a little more fleshed out; however, I don’t think that leaving things unexplained was a bad move on Hitchcock’s part at all. This film sticks with you, and that’s its best attribute. I’m not going to forget watching The Birds for quite a while because even though it’s not Hitchcock’s best film, it is one of his more puzzling. For that reason, it’s well worth your time.

My recommendation: Definitely watch it once, and maybe a couple more times just to let you figure it out.

My grade: 88