Critics reviews

What keeps it so unnervingly unpredictable is that the explanation we crave for why birds have started to attack humanity is never forthcoming. What we get instead, as one possible parallel to Psycho, is murderous violence as an arbitrary dramatic premise. A blond heroine’s sudden flight from a city becomes a trip to the wilds — a movement towards the irrational, inexplicable fury of divine retribution.

No doubt about it, the birdbrains are amassing on our telephone wires and jungle gyms, and we're holding out as long as we can, putting up the good fight. That may sound overstated, but good horror movies convince us our paranoia is justified, and, for me, watching The Birds again put its essential conflicts—between the human and the primal, the forces of love and the agents of destruction—into newly frightening relief.

The Birds represents better than any other Hitchcock film the extreme polarities of his universe: vicious unpredictability and moral and emotional disorder on the one hand, and rigorous stylistic control and formal organization, on the other. These contrasts are often at play in the director's work, but here they take on an almost compulsive quality, allowing Hitchcock full control over the orchestration of chaos and leaving his characters with no consolation but each other's companionship.

In his own crafty way, Hitchcock shows us that comedy, not tragedy, can be the best way to reveal the layers of a character while, crucially, misdirecting the audience's attention. Using a meticulously scored soundtrack of bird effects in lieu of traditional music cues, paired with George Tomasini's brilliant picture editing, heightens the feeling of disquiet. It all culminates in the stunning final shot: the superego has saturated the entire landscape.

Jaws before the world was ready, Hitch's much misappreciated follow-up to Psycho is arguably the greatest of all disaster films—a triumph of special effects, as well as the fountainhead of what has become known as gross-out horror.

However familiar, lionized, and patronized as a genre goof, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds remains the overdiscussed filmmaker's strangest, most consciously surrealist film—indeed, it is the most deeply irrational film ever made by a Hollywood studio. The nature-gone-berserk scenario, now a pop-cult reflex, is still remarkable for having no reasonable foundation, so the extraordinarily evocative set pieces suggest less an exercise in terror/suspense than a nervous, dreamy dose of Hollywood Dada.

Whether you regard the birds as a latterday counterpart to the Furies in Greek mythology or as a winged projection of the director's neurotic imagination, they are still terrifying. The quietness of the countryside on which they descend heightens the disturbing mood of foreboding.

Alfred Hitchcock's most abstract film (1963), and perhaps his subtlest, still yielding new meanings and inflections after a dozen or more viewings. As emblems of sexual tension, divine retribution, meaningless chaos, metaphysical inversion, and aching human guilt, his attacking birds acquire a metaphorical complexity and slipperiness worthy of Melville.

In The Birds Hitchcock deals abstractly with fear itself, rather than with any particular manifestation of it. He does give shape to these fears in the form of the birds, but the birds are less important for what they are than for reactions they elicit. Thus The Birds is especially dependent on sound because of the non-specific quality of sound effects.

With death dropping blandly out of a clear sky - its menace magnified into apocalypse from the crop-dusting scene in North by Northwest - this is Hitchcock at his best. Full of subterranean hints as to the ways in which people cage each other, it's fierce and Freudian as well as great cinematic fun, with ample fodder for the amateur psychologist following up on Hitch's tortuous involvement with his leading ladies.

The Birds is here (at the Palace and Sutton), and what a joy to behold a self-contained movie which does not feed parasitically on outside cultural references—Chekhov, Synge, O'Neill, Genet, Behan, Melville, or what have you. Drawing from the relatively invisible literary talents of Daphne DuMaurier and Evan Hunter, Alfred Hitchcock has fashioned a major work of cinematic art, and "cinematic" is the operative term here, not "literary" or "sociological."