Just watched Hitchcock’s “The Birds” on Netflix. First time I’ve seen it since I was 10 years old. A couple of things stand out here over a half century later:
1) Lead actress Tippi Hedren in her big screen debut plays a character named Melanie, same name as Hedren’s real life daughter, actress Melanie Griffith.
2) Alfred Hitchcock always put himself in a cameo role in each of his films. In this one, the opening sequence shows him walking two fluffy leashed dogs out the revolving front door of an office building opposite Hedren walking in.
3) Hitchcock’s enduring preoccupation with Freudian analysis bubbles to the surface in a comment by supporting actress Suzanne Pleshette who says off-hand to Hedren while discussing lead actor Rod Taylor’s off-kilter relationship with his creepy mother played by a middle-aged Jessica Tandy: “A clinging possessive mother? Wrong! With all due respect to Oedipus, I don’t think that was the case at all.”
4) Speaking of psychopathology, and a wry nod to Anthony Perkins’ twisted relationship with his mummified mother’s remains in Psycho: If Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t already in intensive psychotherapy during the time he made these two movies, he really should have been.
5) Strikingly, although set in 1963 and with the Bodega Bay populace under attack by rampaging hordes of seagulls and crows, not one single person seems to have owned either a shotgun or had any ammunition containing bird shot on hand. Not. One. Single. Person. My, how times have changed. Anyway, where are Clint Eastwood and Bruce Willis when you need them most?
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6) At the time of The Birds’ 1968 TV release, it became the most watched film on television, surpassing Bridge on the River Kwai, and holding on to the top spot until 1972’s Love Story. As I said before: My, how times change.
7) I remember having bad dreams after watching The Birds on TV. But in all fairness, those nightmares were nowhere near as terrifying as the ones I had after watching the Twilight Zone episode called “The Incredible Shrinking Man.” Another story for another day? Perhaps.
8) Hedren was injured, cut by broken glass, during the famous scene where birds attack her in a phone booth. She also repeatedly was subjected to sexual harassment by Hitchcock during filming. Sadly, that was apparently par for the course in those benighted times. As payback for spurning his advances, Hitchcock substituted real birds for mechanical ones in the penultimate bird attack in the bedroom scene without letting Hedren know in advance. Alas: Maybe times haven’t changed that much after all.
9) Though most of the birds in the film were real, the special effects budget for mechanical birds was around $200,000 – an astronomical sum at the time. Still, the Academy Award for special effects that year went instead to the movie version of Cleopatra. The Birds won… exactly nothing. Hmmm, where are Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor when you need them most, eh?
