Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds
How the master of suspense made us fear our feathered friends
Following the success of Psycho in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock was looking for a story to adapt for his next film. He had bought the rights to Daphne Du Maurier’s short story ‘The Birds’ with the intention of adapting it into an episode for his television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. However, after reading reports on unexplained attacks by birds across America, he began to see the cinematic potential in a story that may have been too big, too apocalyptic for TV, and approached production designer Robert Boyle to talk through the technicalities of bringing Du Maurier’s tale to the big screen.
Boyle read ‘The Birds’ as more of “a mood piece” rather than a story with enough going on to justify a feature length film. On that point, I for one am in agreement. If you take Nicholas Roeg’s 1973 adaptation of Du Maurier’s ‘Don’t Look Now’ as an example, it is clear that Roeg was using a series of images and motifs that translated the mood of the story perfectly as opposed to the story itself. Each frame was carefully constructed in order to heighten the feelings of grief which steadily build until a dreadful mood takes over. If you were to ask somebody what the story of Don’t Look Now is, they wouldn’t be able to tell you anything more than it’s kind of a horror film about weird things that happen to a married couple who are grieving for their daughter. They would, however, probably go on to tell you that the mood of the picture left them feeling disturbed.
The same can be said for ‘The Birds.’ It’s a story about events that happen suddenly and end just as quickly without a solid explanation as to why. Characters theorise, mentioning everything from a change in climate to the Russians being involved, and wonder aloud how their inept government is going to help them. One of the strongest scenes in The Birds (1963) has the residents of the town doing the same. You have the town drunk proclaiming it to be the end of the world whilst an arrogant customer sitting beside him shows his ignorance by telling everyone that the problem can be easily solved through the use of firearms. Meanwhile, a mother grows ever more hysterical in front of her children and an ornithologist uses the information she’s been taught through books to repudiate eyewitnesses’ claims that the birds are working in unison with each other. Not one person can give a solid explanation, and to do so, as Hitchcock stated, would have pushed The Birds into the realm of science fiction.
Hitchcock’s adaptation succeeds most by not giving in to audience’s demands for a rational explanation. In the absence of an explanation, much of the screen time in the film’s first half is given over to fleshing out the principal characters. Screenwriter Evan Hunter includes an ongoing back and forth between Melanie (Tippi Hedren) and Mitch (Rod Taylor) that was influenced by screwball comedies of the 1940s. Hunter wrote Melanie as a socialite and Mitch as a lawyer, pitting them against each other from their first introduction in a pet store, where Mitch is looking to buy a bird as a birthday present for his 11-year-old sister, Cathy (Veronica Cartwright). The opening scene plays like light romantic comedy with Hedren in the Audrey Hepburn role and Taylor standing in for Cary Grant. Hitchcock’s cameo as a customer leaving the store with his two Sealyham Terriers adds to the playful tone. Mitch leaves the store without buying a bird, leading Melanie to travel to Bodega Bay to deliver two lovebirds in person. Her reasons for travelling to Mitch’s home are not entirely convincing; is she trying to prove that there’s more to her than the portrayal Mitch has gleaned from stories in the tabloid press, or is she so enamoured by Mitch from this brief encounter that she can’t help herself? We do find out later that she’s a spontaneous person when Mitch’s widowed mother Lydia Brenner (Jessica Tandy) voices her disdain for a woman who frolics around naked in a fountain in Rome (a nod to Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) perhaps?). But when Melanie meets Annie (Suzanne Pleshette), a school teacher and former flame of Mitch’s who gives Melanie a place to stay, she learns that Lydia is jealous of any woman Mitch strikes up a relationship with. Annie, in turn, shows signs of jealousy towards Melanie when it becomes apparent that Mitch has feelings for her. The themes of jealousy (tinged with envy on Annie’s part) are heightened through a colour palette made up of greens (Melanie’s green dress, green lovebirds, green telephones and furniture).
From the moment she arrives in Bodega Bay, Melanie is cast as an outsider, her fur coat a display of wealth that stands in stark contrast to the earthy clothes worn by the fishermen and blue collar workers in the town. The lovebirds she carries with her in a gilded cage are exotic opposites to the gulls that dive for fish in the harbour. When the first gull strikes, messing up Melanie’s impeccable bun and leaving her with a cut on her head, her carefully composed outward appearance is stripped away, allowing for a more relatable and thus approachable person to come to the fore, resulting in Lydia’s final acceptance of Melanie and confession that she fears losing her son like she did his father.
All of this is very well written and played, but why not adapt the characters from the story and enhance the themes Du Maurier outlined through Nat, the war veteran whose resilience and logic flies in the face of his employer Mr. Trigg, a farmer who has embraced the mechanisation and shifts in the landscape and, like the ignoramus in the diner, believes the birds can be defeated with a gun. Relocating the action from a Cornish village during a bleak winter to a bright unspecified season in a northern Californian town at first seems like an odd choice. Hitchcock expressed his love for the film’s location as the landscape and unpredictable weather patterns reminded him of England, so why not shoot on England’s south-west coast instead? The answer is simple: The Birds is a Hollywood picture with American stars, and to return to the region of his first Du Maurier adaptation, 1939’s Jamaica Inn, would have felt like a step backwards after years of trying so tirelessly to break into Hollywood, which he eventually did with Rebecca (a second Du Maurier adaptation) in 1940.
“In the distance he could see the clay hills, white and clean, against the heavy pallor of the sky. Something black rose from behind them, like a smudge at first, then widening, becoming deeper, and the smudge became a cloud, and the cloud divided again into five other clouds, spreading north, east, south, and west, and they were not clouds at all; they were birds.”
Hitchcock claimed that he rarely remembered the stories he adapted, choosing to stamp them with his own vision rather than reread them. One can only imagine then, how the above passage would have translated to film. It’s a wonderful, threatening, and wholly cinematic image that would have laid bare the apocalypse to come. What I like about Hunter’s script, however, is how he gives the audience just enough to keep them on the edge of their seats. The first strike comes at a point after Melanie has delivered the lovebirds to Mitch’s home. The equally measured second incident (a bird thudding against Annie’s door) interrupts the interactions between Melanie and Annie. The threat isn’t as immediately apparent as it is in the story, yet we know that these incidents are as portentous as Du Maurier’s clouds. What feels like a personal attack on Melanie becomes an attack on Annie’s home, but this too could be interpreted as an attack because Melanie is staying there. It’s only when children are ambushed at a party that we begin to realise that the birds are attacking mankind, punishing them for their complacency and for Cathy accepting a gift in the form of two caged birds. Even after sparrows infiltrate the Brenner home through the chimney, severely disturbing Cathy, she is still allowed to go to school the following morning, a further indication of the humans’ complacency towards mother nature.
It’s at this point in the film that Hitchcock delivers two of his most memorable scenes. Lydia, concerned over her chickens’ refusal to eat the feed she puts down for them, visits a neighbour to discover his eyeless corpse lying prone amongst the aftermath of a bird attack. Hitchcock’s “subjective use of camera” shows the corpse in three individual shots, each shot moving in closer to the face, giving the impression of Lydia performing a triple take as she processes the image of her neighbour with his eyes pecked out. When she returns home in a state of shock, Melanie volunteers to collect Cathy from school. Cue one of the Hitchcock’s most sustained and technically innovative sequences.
Melanie sits on a bench outside school, smoking a cigarette and listening to the children inside sing ‘Risseldy-Rosseldy,’ an old folk song in the public domain which was adapted by Hunter and drawn out with added stanzas to fit the scene (he continued to receive royalties from the song throughout his life). While Melanie waits, a crow lands on the climbing frame in the background. Cut back to Melanie still smoking in a medium shot. Hitchcock holds on her long enough for the tension to build. We the audience have seen the bird land. Melanie hasn’t. Cut back to the climbing frame now filled with crows. The effect is made all the more alarming for us because we can’t warn Melanie of the impending threat. Sensing the birds gathering behind her, Melanie turns then moves cautiously towards the school to warn Annie. They evacuate the children under the pretence that they are practising for a fire drill. As soon as they leave the building, the birds attack.
By 1958, blue screen had been perfected, but to achieve the maximum effect of a bird attack, Hitchcock needed to push the technology further. He hired Ub Iwerks, a special effects technician and animator who had helped develop the design for Mickey Mouse for Disney, and whose work at the studio had advanced the travelling matte shot (a subject in the foreground superimposed onto a blue screen), which had resulted in the creation of the sodium vapour process (or yellow screen). Through the use of yellow screen, Iwerk was able to eliminate the contamination or blue flare from background light often found in blue screen by illuminating background with yellow sodium light while the actors in the foreground were illuminated by white light. This was achieved by using two films in the camera, one sensitive to yellow, one to white. Combining foregrounds and backgrounds photographed at different times in an optimal printer in post-production, and having the actors run on treadmills while actual birds fluttered around their heads, Hitchcock was able to realise his vision in a sequence that had a realism never before seen in cinema.
What makes the birds’ attacks so powerful is the use of yellow screen and rotoscoping combined with more basic approaches like puppeteering, having seed scattered in actors hair and attaching the birds’ feet to actors’ collars. To achieve the effect of birds’ beaks pecking through a wooden door in the Brenner home, fakes bird heads were attached to hammers. For the scene with Melanie trapped in a bedroom while birds attack her, handlers literally threw live birds at her, something she didn’t know was going to happen until the day of the shoot after an assistant director informed her that mechanical birds weren’t going to work. The five days it took to shoot the scene resulted in her being hospitalised with exhaustion; the Melanie we see being carried downstairs by Mitch is a double. Hitchcock filmed the bedroom scene in the same way he filmed Marion Crane’s death in the shower in Psycho, using fast editing to convey disorientation and panic. He also displays his love for bitter irony when Mitch is unable to come to her aid faster due to Melanie’s body blocking the door.
In stark contrast to the grainy black and white look of Psycho, The Birds is vibrant and visually stunning, thanks to matte artist Albert Whitlock. A passing comment about Bodega Bay’s landscape looking like a painting urged Hitchcock to hire Whitlock to paint the backgrounds that would, in collaboration with Iwerk and Boyle’s work, bring about The Birds overall look. The famous overhead shot of gulls gathering while the town goes up in flames benefits hugely from Whitlock’s work; the surrounding town is a matte painting, as is the background outside the telephone booth where Melanie comes under siege. (As a footnote to the booth attack, and a further testament to Hedren’s commitment to the role, the glass was supposed to be shatter-proof. When a model gull was launched at the booth, it shattered, showering Hedren in shards of glass.)
“Nat listened. Muffled sounds came from the windows, from the door. Wings brushing the surface, sliding, scraping, seeking a way of entry. The sound of many bodies, pressed together, shuffling on the sills. Now and again came a thud, a crash, as some bird dived and fell.”
Also in contrast to Psycho’s shower scene is Hitchcock’s decision to film Melanie’s assault without accompanying music. In Psycho, Bernard Herrmann’s score highlights Norman Bates’s frenzy, the short screeching notes on the violins reflecting the stabbing motions of the knife and a mind split by madness. In The Birds, there is no musical score. Hitchcock wanted to film a “silent murder,” drawing on his background in silent cinema to recreate that era’s “pure cinema” aesthetic. Silent movies were run in the projection room to point towards the mood Hitchcock was trying to achieve in The Birds. When we see Melanie and the Brenner family sit listening to birds thudding and scratching outside their home, Hitchcock had a drummer perform a roll, increasing the tempo as the actors moved up from their sitting positions and began pacing the room. The sound effects were electronically enhanced by German composer Remi Gassmann, who, along with Oskar Scala, worked closely alongside Herrmann to compose a score made up entirely of other worldly bird calls and the fluttering of wings, so that by the end, we’re not entirely sure whether the calls are emanating from the birds or echoing inside the traumatised minds of their victims.
In all, an unprecedented 371 trick shots were used in The Birds. The closing shot alone combines thirty-two pieces of film, including three to duplicate the amount of gulls, separate strips for the sunbeams, and another strip for the car driving off into the distance. But originally the film wasn’t going to end there. In Hunter’s script, we follow the car through the town and out onto the exit road where the birds assemble for one final assault, ripping through the canvas on top of the car. Hitchcock even toyed with the idea of closing the film with a shot of the Golden Gate Bridge covered with birds, a last touch that would have been more in line with Du Maurier’s vision of the birds’ more widespread attacks on London. As exciting as this prospect is, the closing shot delivers in a far more haunting way. The extended scenes in Hunter’s script would have felt like a climax. Without them, it feels more like a return to what came before, and we’re left to hope (but doubt) that the humans hubris has taken such a knock that they’ll never be as complacent again.
For this essay I referenced the documentary All about The Birds and Patrick McGilligan’s book, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light.
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