WHAT: The Birds (1963)
WHEN: March 19, 2025 1 PM & 7 PM
WHERE: Pickwick Theatre, Park Ridge, IL
WHAT ELSE: Pre-show music by Jay Warren at 6:30 PM!
HOW MUCH: $12/$10 Advance or $10 for the 1 PM matinee
Advance Tickets: Click Here and select date and time.
“It’s a movie about the dangers of complacency, I think is what he said. We all take things for granted, and we take birds for granted. What if they suddenly turned, you know? This is what would happen. That’s a theme that runs through a lot of Hitchcock’s pictures — that people take things for granted, people go through their life unthinkingly. And then something happens and they have to think.” ~ Peter Bogdanovich
After the success of Psycho (1960), expectations were high for Alfred Hitchcock. How could he top the earlier film? His next project proved to be one of his most famous– and one of his best. With its horror and apocalyptic terror centering around the animal kingdom, The Birds (1963) anticipates the later “nature retribution” movies of the 1970s like The Swarm (1978), among dozens of others. The film was originally planned for last season to correspond with its sixtieth anniversary, but we are excited to finally be able to present it March 19, 2025, on the Pickwick Theatre’s Mega-screen. We will be showing a 4K DCP restoration of this quintessential Hitchcock thriller.
The Birds was based on the 1952 Daphne du Maurier novella of the same name. Du Maurier had also written Rebecca (1940), which became Hitchcock’s first directorial effort in America. The story was originally purchased for Hitchcock’s television show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. However, when real-life bird attacks made headlines, Hitchcock saw the cinematic potential in the story. Screenwriter Evan Hunter adapted the short story. Aside from the title and the basic idea of a bird attack, little else was retained for the film version.
Society girl Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) meets an attorney, Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor), in a pet shop and, seeing a romantic opportunity, follows him to his weekend retreat in Bodega Bay, California. She plans to surprise him with two lovebirds as a gift for his 11 year old sister (Veronica Cartwright). A bird strike on Melanie brings the two closer together, but Mitch’s mother (Jessica Tandy) remains distant with this new woman in her son’s life. Melanie also meets Annie (Suzanne Pleshette), the local schoolteacher who happens to be an ex-lover of Mitch’s. Melanie’s relationship with Mitch becomes stronger during her stay in town, but love isn’t the only thing in the air. More bird attacks follow until the whole town is finally under siege.
Tippi Hedren
Evan Hunter structured the story so that it opened like a screwball comedy with a “meet cute” in a pet store with a society heiress as the main character. This lighter tone, which gradually descends into darker themes, appealed to Hitchcock’s sensibilities. Also unique is the fact that the filmmakers never explain why the birds attack. (If they did, the film would be science fiction.) There is, however, a scene in a restaurant in which the characters speculate as to why all this is happening. But no concrete reason is ever given. Characters simply take the natural world for granted. In The Birds, all the characters are initially self-absorbed, and their personal world is far from harmonious. The birds come to represent this unpredictability and turmoil that the protagonists feel inside.
Tippi Hedren was cast as Melanie. Hedren had a modelling career in New York and was discovered when one of her television commercials appeared during a broadcast of The Today Show. After a successful screen test, she signed a long-term contract with Hitchcock and later appeared in his Marnie (1964). The Birds was a challenging shoot for Hedren, both in terms of fending off Hitch’s alleged romantic advances and dealing with the physical demands of the role. She later collapsed from exhaustion after filming the scene in which her character is attacked by birds in the Brenner home. Hedren had assumed she would be working with mechanical birds in this scene, but they did not work. Instead, she had real birds thrown at her for five days straight! Costarring is Rod Taylor, best known for his lead role in 1960’s The Time Machine. Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleshette and Veronica Cartwright complete the cast of main players. Alfred Hitchcock has his cameo early in the film when he is seen leaving the pet store with two dogs (which were, in fact, his own).
The film was shot mainly in Bodega Bay in northern California, but some scenes were also done in San Francisco and at Universal Studios, California. Hitchcock shot on location when he had to, but he preferred the controlled environment of the studio. Production designer Robert Boyle, who created the sets and contributed to the overall tone of the film, has said that he was inspired by the famous painting “The Scream” by Edvard Munch. He wanted to convey that same sense of doom onto the film itself. As a result, The Birds has the ominous tone of a judgment day.
The Birds may well be Hitchcock’s most technically proficient film. The number of special effects, totaling 371 trick shots, certainly make it unique in Hitchcock’s body of work. The movie’s final shot alone consisted of 32 separate elements. To accomplish the effects, the filmmakers enlisted the facilities of other studios. In order to make the process shots appear more realistic– instead of using the “blue screen” technique, which often left a fringing around the character or object– Hitch’s team took advantage of sodium vapor lamps that were being used at Walt Disney Studios. In fact, these special effects were supervised by Disney’s Ub Iwerks, a consultant on the film who was later nominated for an Academy Award for his work. (He lost to Cleopatra that year.) In this process, a character in the foreground is photographed under white light against a yellow screen. The result produced a higher quality composite unlike the aforementioned blue screen system.
In addition to Ub Iwerks, special effects pioneer Linwood Dunn worked on The Birds. Dunn was on the effects team for the original King Kong (1933). He had experience using the optical printer, which he invented, in fact. In the early days, effects were typically done in the camera, but the optical printer allowed filmmakers to combine separately filmed images onto one film strip. Dunn’s main contribution for Hitchcock was assembling a rough cut of the attic sequence. Given the complexity of all of these scenes, every shot was planned in pre-production. As with Hitchcock’s other films, The Birds was carefully storyboarded.
The Birds is another example of Hitchcock’s mastery of montage. The film’s editor was George Tomasini, but Hitch knew what he wanted. He knew exactly how many feet a shot should be– and how many frames. The Birds well represents the director’s sense of cinema. The counterpart to Psycho‘s famous shower scene is the attack on Melanie in the attic with its quick cuts. Another instance of the film’s excellent use of montage is the scene in which a gas station attendant is struck by a bird, leading to an explosion. The seemingly frozen reaction shots of Melanie as she witnesses this, expressed through jump cuts, is one of the film’s more striking examples.
The film’s subjective use of the camera builds tension. This is seen notably in the sequence where Melanie delivers the lovebirds to the Brenner home and then hastily departs in a motorboat. During this surprise visit, her character is looking to see where Mitch is on the premises. The audience is with her the whole time, experiencing everything through Melanie’s eyes or her vantage point. This is not always the case, however. One of the most famous shots in the entire film is the bird’s eye view– or “God’s point of view” shot– depicting the town set ablaze by the explosion. It’s a process shot involving a matte painting and footage of some actual buildings, but it reveals the town from high above suggesting either the birds’ POV or an omniscient presence transcending mankind.
In place of a conventional film score that could’ve been composed by Bernard Herrmann, Hitchcock turned to an electro-acoustic “Mixtur-Trautonium.” This instrument was used to create sounds electronically to simulate bird calls. This early version of a synthesizer was first discovered by Hitchcock back in the 1920s when he was visiting Germany. Nevertheless, Bernard Herrmann remained a “sound consultant” for this production. Instead of traditional music, Hitchcock relied on sound effects in scenes such as the avian assault in the Brenner attic. In this sequence, the audience only hears the sound of flapping wings.
Most viewers who are familiar with the film remember the quiet ending that seemingly suggests a climax to come. But there was a final sequence that was storyboarded and never shot. After Mitch and Melanie leave the house, the birds proceed to attack Melanie’s Aston-Martin, which has a canvas top. This overhead bird strike as they race through Bodega Bay would have taken at least another month to shoot given the technical challenges involved. Hitchcock later joked about ending the film with a shot of the Golden Gate Bridge covered with birds.
The Birds was released on March 28, 1963. Compared to Psycho, it was a commercial disappointment– but by no means a flop. (Just five years later, viewership went through the roof when NBC debuted it on television.) Originally, the film received some mixed reviews, but over the course of time, its reputation grew to the point where it is now considered one of the great films of cinema and horror movie history. Filmmakers such as Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa have listed it as one of their favorite films. Its influence can be felt particularly in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), whose resort town of Amity Island recalls Hitch’s Bodega Bay. There are obvious parallels between the two films. For example, Richard Dreyfuss’ Matt Hooper being submerged in the shark cage and then attacked recalls the scene of Melanie in the confined space of a phone booth, which is also under bombardment.
In an era where films are now overrun by digital effects and threatened by AI as a substitute for creativity, The Birds continues to soar. It’s a testament to what filmmakers could achieve in the Hollywood system of old. Bringing the threat of the birds to life was a technical challenge that was solved with the best tools then available. When the finches invade the Brenner household and burst through the chimney, there are no obvious signs it’s a process shot, at least for the average moviegoer, and yet we know the actors are not really in a room with birds flying all around them. Even the most minor effect, such as Mitch opening the front door at the end of the movie– which was suggested visually through lighting techniques since there was no actual door there– convey the magic of movies. Finally, in our era where moviegoers are hit over the head with action almost from the start, The Birds is a model example of how to set pace and build story structure, as laid out in the film’s first act.
~MCH
Alfred Hitchcock on set…
1963 vs. 2025 at the Pickwick Theatre