A Flock of Seagulls

Year: 1963

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren, Suzanne Pleshette

Run Time: 1 hour 59 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

The second part of my horror class' Hitchcock Halloween Double Feature was his highly divisive second horror feature The Birds. In my experience, The Birds is a pea soup horror movie - you either love it or you hate it. There's no in between. As evidenced by my inclusion of the film in my Five Scariest Movies article, I am firmly in the "love it" camp.

For most pre-1970's horror movies, viewers are advised to view them from the perspective of the audiences of the time. "If you think about what movie effects were like in the 30's, you'd be totally terrified of Frankenstein/Psycho/The Creature From the Black Lagoon too, man!" Well that's all fine and dandy, but sometimes I don't want to watch horror as an academic. I came to be scared, not to imagine somebody else being scared.

The Birds is one of the few films between cinema's inception and, let's say Night of the Living Dead in 1968 that still holds up tremendously under the scrutiny of the jaded eye of the modern horror fan. Some of the effects do show their age, but this film is a showcase of some of the best composite cinematography available at the time. It's not modern perhaps, but it's still great workmanship and consistently exciting.

No, those birds weren't there. No, I don't care. I'd still run.

The trick of The Birds lies in its plotting. Melanie Daniels (beautiful newcomer Tippi Hedren) is a young and mischievous San Francisco socialite who meets handsome swain Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) by chance in a bird shop. She pretends to be an employee for sh*ts and gigs, but her ability to aid him in procuring a pair of lovebirds for his kid sister is impeded by her utter lack of knowledge about bird species.

The two quarrel good humoredly and Mitch leaves empty handed. Because her schedule was free that weekend, Melanie decided to purchase a set of birds and deliver them personally to the man with a note admonishing his rudeness. When she discovers he's on vacation she follows him up the coast to the beautiful town of Bodega Bay. Through a series of misunderstandings and good-natured lies, her prank goes too far as she ends up chartering a rowboat, traveling across the bay, and sneaking into his mother's house to deliver the birdcage.

Basically, for the first half hour or so, The Birds is a zany romantic comedy until... a lone seagull swoops down from the sky and claws Melanie's forehead. What follows is a series of increasingly vicious attacks by different flocks of birds that continues throughout the movie. The delightful and charming opening of the film was but a sham to suck you in, get you involved with the characters, and then run them through a conveyor belt of never-ending terror.

But thanks to the amount of time we get to spend with the actual people in the plot as opposed to just the horrors, the film is also successful as a character study of the interactions of a broken family [Mitch is supporting his widowed mother (Jessica Tandy) and his little sister (Veronica Cartwright) on his own] and a woman who's trying to find her way in life.

So we have this opening act of stellar old-fashioned romantic comedy followed terrifying bird attacks combined with a hearty family drama. And the biggest surprise? The gore effects are good too! Evidently the deterioration of film censorship came a long way in the wake of Psycho leading to grisly scenes like the neighbor with his eyes pecked out.

Lazy bum didn't even change out of his pajamas.

The success of The Birds with its abrupt tonal shifts and delicate juggling act of themes lies entirely on the backs of three people: Alfred Hitchcock (obviously), sound designer Bernard Hermann, and Tippi Hedren.

Alfred Hitchcock's talent at manufacturing suspense is a given, of course, but it is commendable that after having so thoroughly proven himself with previous films, he still sought out ways to make his next movie even bigger and better. The lengthy attack scenes in The Birds are like Hitchcock wrapping his hands around your neck, pausing for a minute, and then slowly squeezing until you're gasping for air.

One sequence in particular in which a murder of crows attacks a schoolhouse is terrifying, not necessarily because of the fact that murderous (ha) birds are attacking young children, but rather because of the fact that we see them slowly gathering behind Tippi Hedren as she obliviously smokes a cigarette.

We know what's going to happen. And there's nothing we can do to stop it. The pressure builds and builds until it finally explodes into a cacophony of squawks, beaks, and wings. The slow boil approach that Hitchcock uses here more or less erases the inherent silliness of the film's premise, allowing us time to ponder just how many uses a sharp bird's beak might be put to. Or just how many birds there are in the world. Or the fact that random acts of nature similar to (but perhaps slightly less preposterous than) this happen all the time.

This slow easing into the more absurd elements is handled so masterfully that even when the birds blow up a gas station, it is still closer to Psycho than Birdemic.

Believe you me, you see this and you're not gonna be thinking "This is a ridiculous plot point." You'll be sprinting away as fast as you can.

But enough about Hitchcock. Everybody know's he's great. Bernard Hermann, sound designer and composer of the score for Psycho, plays an equally important role in the overall impact of the film. He was originally hired to write a score, but he thought it would be best to keep the film absolutely devoid of music (save for a hauntingly creepy moment set during the children's choir class).

Instead the audience's ears are buffeted with a hurricane of squawks and flaps that underly and occasionally overtake the action in most every scene. This attack on the eardrums is unsettling in the highest degree and keeps one firmly planted in the universe of the movie no matter how much they might want to get away.

And you do want to get away.

Which brings us to Tippi Hedren. The star of the show. Sure, Hermann and Hitchcock did the grunt work, providing a magnificent framework for this woman to thrive, but without her star turn as Melanie, the film would have been rudderless and careening wildly.

Melanie Daniels is a human Barbie doll. She's gorgeous and fabulous. She's rich, playful, and irresponsible. She grew up toying without people, paying no mind to the consequences. But after a media snafu in Rome (and through the cavalcade of bird attacks), she has become unmoored, searching for her place on the shelf of life.

Melanie is a wounded woman. She was once free as a bird (geddit) but she needs to find a place to land on her feet.

She supports charities. She's putting a poor Third World child through school. But to what ends should she dedicate her characteristic passion? With an uncaring father and an absentee mother, she has never known the unconditional love of another person, which during the course of her adventure she finds not in Mitch but in his initially untrusting mother.

Melanie's complicated personality layers and deep hurt are handled with great care by Ms. Hedren who puts in one of the single best performances in a horror film that I've ever seen. Equal parts blasé, fabulous, vulnerable, and tenacious, this woman is a masterpiece of character, both in writing and performance. Without her, The Birds is nothing.

Such fabulous. Much appreciate.

It's true that The Birds is much less monumental and groundbreaking than Psycho, but in my opinion, it is the better movie in terms of tension, thrills, and character development.

I have opinions, so sue me.

One last thing before I go (I'm about to lay down some Film Theory 101 on y'all so the uninterested can feel free to skip to the end): The nature of the bird attacks is a mystery. Is it because we're polluting the Earth? Is it because Melanie is a classless ho (as some of my classmates seem to think - they are not very nice people)? Is it because of the two lovebirds who remain in their cage in the Brenner house?

Who know?

That's the nature of nature - to be unfathomable and illogical. Things happen. Some of them are good. Some of them are bad. Some of them will peck out your eyes. And that is infinitely more terrifying than some half-baked environmental treatise.

I would like to think that my theory is supported in the scene where Melanie is trapped in a phone booth outside the diner. Around her she sees representations of fire (the gas station explosion), water (a stray fire hose is mucking up the works), air (the birds, naturally), and earth (an overturned cart of cabbages). These four natural elements present in the same scene imply that the bird attacks are merely a force of nature - elemental and inescapable.

And that's why I'm afraid.

TL;DR: The Birds is Hitchcock's best horror film, hands down.
Rating: 9/10
Word Count: 1573

Mama's Boy

Year: 1960

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles

Run Time: 1 hour 49 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

For our class during the week of Halloween, my Horror Studies professor decided to do a double feature of Hitchcock's horror movies. I decided that, instead of including them as mini-reviews in a Splatter University post, I should give each film its own full review because come on. Hitchcock.

There are seven movies responsible for everything that I am today. Twitch of the Death Nerve, a seminal Italian giallo film and one of the first slasher movies to feature a teenaged cast (for a third of the film, at least). Black Christmas and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, both in 1974, cemented in the idea of a Final Girl. Halloween made low budget horror massively profitable again. Friday the 13th incited the slasher boom and Scream dragged it into the modern age.

But before any of this could happen, there was a horror picture filmed for chump change on a studio backlot, based on a pulp horror novel that nobody had ever read. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho was a massive splash - a watershed moment for horror and for cinema itself with a violence unparalleled in American cinema at the time.

It's hilariously tame by today's standards, but Psycho's gore took violent cinema to a whole new level. Having spent the last few weeks of class sitting through an onslaught of 50's genre films I can assure you that horror films at the time were like taking shots of milk, whereas Psycho was like having a bottle of tequila smashed over your head.

Woo! Spring Break!

Now I'm going to go ahead and assume that there's no need to worry about spoilers in a 53-year-old film that most everybody has either seen or read about. I think that's fair. If you really don't know what happens, just go watch it and come back. You can let me know how I'm doing.

To properly discuss Psycho, one must start before the movie even begins because Hitchcock isn't a simple filmmaker to discuss. No, he's much too obstinate for that. When filming an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, he was impressed with the speed and efficiency of the television crew. Because they were working for TV, they couldn't waste a single second of extra budget so they had to get in, get out, and wrap shooting in record time while still producing high quality material.

He decided to challenge himself to shoot a film cheaply with a TV crew on studio sets in the Universal Backlot. What happened was Psycho and I'm not sure even he could have predicted how successful it would prove to be.

OK, maybe he could.

Which brings us to our next point. Psycho was groundbreaking in more ways than one, because otherwise that would have been way too easy to write about. In addition to its violent content, Psycho explores sex in the modern age with a newfound freedom due to the weakening of the long-standing (and astoundingly Puritanical) Hays Code of film censorship.

Only a few years before, it would have been impossible to imagine any depictions of a real sexual lifestyle, but here we are with a man and a woman in bed together, kissing, obviously post-coitus. And the man is divorced! Positively scandalous. Think of the children!

In addition to this, Psycho is one of the first films to say "transvestite" (a word that was thought at the time to be perverse and almost didn't make it past the censors) and is the first American film to show a toilet flushing onscreen. The horror!

Due to its out of the box material and shockingly modern plot elements, the film was an out and out smash at the box office. It has since made over 30 million dollars, has a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (with the majority of the 3 bad reviews complaining that it's "too gory"), and landed the number one spot on the AFI's 100 Scariest Movies list.

So what's it all about, then, eh?

Pecs. That's what it's all about.

Young secretary Marion Crane (Janet Leigh, who would later give birth to the heir to her Scream Queen throne, Jamie Lee Curtis) is dissatisfied with her life in Phoenix. Her studbucket boyfriend Sam Loomis (John Gavin) lives far away in California, her pay isn't nearly enough, and her haircut is atrocious. When asked by her employer to deposit $40,000 in the bank on the way home (today's equivalent: $315,000), she absconds with the cash and hightails it out of the state.

On her way to her boyfriend's town, she grows weary and the torrential downpour proves too much to handle so she stops for the night in a seedy little inn known as the Bates Motel. It is run by a charming young man named Norman (Anthony Perkins, who is absolutely incredible except, weirdly, in the scenes where he has to have conversation with his mother - the only acting complaint I have throughout the entire film) who takes care of his invalid mother and struggles to keep the business afloat. It's been tough ever since they moved the highway away.

Marion struggles with her guilt over stealing the money, and is eventually (indirectly) inspired by Norman to go straight home in the morning and return the cash with heartfelt apologies (Lord knows how she would have kept her job, but this was the 60's and she was a charming broad so you never know). Unfortunately, being stabbed repeatedly with a knife isn't conducive to a successful road trip.

RUDE.

The rest of the film follows the investigation into her disappearance by Sam, her sister Lila (Vera Miles), and the condescending Detective Arbogast (Martin Balsam). But that's not important right now. Our protagonist is dead. But the film's still going. Who let that happen?

Through clever marketing (and an incredible gimmick of not allowing latecomers into the theater), Hitch primed the audience for the shock of their lives. Janet Leigh was the biggest star on the cast, had the highest billing, and was featured prominently in the advertising. Her character was dynamic, had a change of heart, and was set on a path of redemption, the likes of which the audience was surely expecting. Hitch even put in his customary cameo in the first ten minutes of the movie so people looking for him wouldn't be distracted once the plot proper began.

By quite literally cutting the main character out of the film around the halfway point, audience expectations were rent apart. Anything could happen now. What could possibly come next? (Scream also successfully used this tactic by gutting Drew Barrymore in the opening scene.) Honestly, what comes next is a bit of a letdown considering that any contemporary filmgoer who watches Psycho already knows the ending so they're not impressed with the mysteries surrounding the Bates family.

And therein lies the problem. Having heard so much about Psycho for so long, modern audiences go in expecting to see a deliciously scary film and surprising twists and turns. Due to the oversaturation of discussion on the film, they are likely to find neither of these. Thus the innate power has been diminished and ravaged by time. But for audiences in the 60's, this was enormously inventive stuff (very few of them had read the book, considering that Hitch had bought as many copies as he could to keep them out of stores).

Hitchcock is about as insane as Norman Bates himself.

It is perhaps a better experience to come into Psycho looking for a decent thriller as opposed to a great horror film. If you come in primed for horror, you'll be bored out of your mind. But as a crime procedural, it still holds water. Because, no matter what, it is still an incredible example of filmmaking from one of the medium's greatest auteurs. This is the first time I've rewatched the film since actually learning about the mechanics of the craft, and the symbolism and direction remain incredibly fascinating. 

The opening shot of Psycho is a bird's-eye-view of a cityscape, a setting I in no way associate with the film's small town vibe. But this sets up one of the film's heavy undercurrents of city slickers versus town dwellers and the associated class disparity. Marion is underpaid and overworked, but she still has the opportunity to jet off with thousands of dollars in her purse. Norman is the head of a struggling business abandoned by the highway, a symbol of the fast-moving modern lifestyle. He is trapped there by his circumstances (and his insanity) although he wishes to be free, as evidenced by his obsession with stuffing birds. 

He's jealous of the birds' ability to fly away and be free so he stuffs them and keeps them in his parlor, keeping them trapped just like himself. Just like he traps Marion in death. Also there's the whole bird of prey thing.

Two meanings in a symbol?! That's crazy talk.

Another thing I noticed this time around was Marion's propensity for ending up in bathrooms. When she's packing her bags to book it out of town, she is framed with her apartment's shower head looming over her. When she needs to exchange her car at a used car lot to avoid being followed, she goes to the Ladies' Room to hide the cash in her purse. Mind you, this was not a normal setting for action at the time. This was very very deliberate. We're conditioned to see her in the restroom so the shower scene will be that much more surprising when it finally comes along.

There's an abundance of things I haven't even mentioned, like the fact that Marion's bra changes color with her mood, but the shower scene is what really captured attention. No self-respecting review could get away with not mentioning it. But why has it become so iconic? What about it has so captured imaginations for over half a century?

First off, the attack in an intimate setting really got under people's skin. Janet Leigh herself watched the film and vowed then and there to never take a shower again. Second, the aforementioned premature murder of the woman who was presumably the protagonist. But the most memorable aspect of the scene has to be its rapid editing, with over 78 splices in 45 seconds. This cutting is of a completely different style of any other scene in the film, before or after. Because the scene's content was so jarring, so too was the style in which it was presented - much more evocative and kinetic than anything anyone had ever seen before.

It's time to bring in modern audiences again (I'm sorry, guys). Everybody has seen this scene. Babies have seen this scene. People expecting a movie just like this scene are going to be highly disappointed. Despite its thrills, and it actually is a masterful crime/police thriller, Psycho will rarely deliver upon the massive expectations heaped upon it. It's a darn shame considering the skill behind and in front of the camera. Psycho is a wonderful movie. The trick is approaching it from the proper perspective. And not even in that "it was good for the time it was made" way. It's still great today! It's just carrying way too much baggage for even the most perfect film in history to slough off.

One last thing: a word on Bernard Hermann's score - while everybody knows the screeching shower scene music, I feel that many are unaware that the entire film sounds like that. Even when Marion is driving down the street in her car in the rain, the orchestral score is shouting "CAR! CAR! SPOOKY CAR! MAYBE SOMEONE'S GONNA DIE! LOOK HOW WET AND SLICK THE ROADS ARE! WATCH OUT MARION!" I wouldn't say it detracts from the overall film in any real way, but it certainly dilutes the impact of the major scare scenes. When your score blares the alarm for everything from "BRA!" to "SANDWICHES!" it's hard to give any special attention to something like "TRANSVESTITE WITH A KNIFE!"

Let's look at Sam Loomis one last time before we go.

TL;DR: Psycho is a great, well-made thriller, but it suffers as a direct result of its massive reputation.

Rating: 8/10; and though I am loathe to give it such a relatively low score due to its cultural importance, part of my blog's mission statement is to assess entertainment value from a modern perspective. Ergo, 8.

Word Count: 2099

Reviews in This Series

Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960)

Psycho II (Franklin, 1983)

Psycho III (Perkins, 1986)

Psycho IV: The Beginning (Garris, 1990)