Jason KingThe Birds ($16)
November 28th 2008 05:49
The Birds ($16)
Alfred Hitchcock is GOD!!
This film blows my mind every time I see it - the film has not dated in 45 years, the locations, the shots, the costumes and the scares are cinematic gold and will never fade. I am shocked that Micheal Bay is remaking this starring Naomi Watts and George Clooney - NO NO NO!!! Do not touch this film - leave it as it is. It doesn't need a remake - just a re-release and it would make squillions more!
In THE BIRDS, Alfred Hitchcock's heart-pounding follow-up to PSYCHO, the director couples a tone of rigorous morality with dark humor to create a thriller that begins as a light comedy and ends as an apocalyptic allegory. Tippi Hedren (Melanie Griffith's mother) carries the picture in her first film role ever, embarking on a career as an icy-cool leading lady. Loosely based on a Daphne du Maurier story and a Santa Monica newspaper account, "Seabird Invasion Hits Coastal Homes," THE BIRDS also features groundbreaking special effects that, in 1963, surprised and delighted audiences. Wealthy reformed party girl Melanie Daniels (Hedren) enjoys a brief flirtation with lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) in a San Francisco pet shop and decides to follow him to his Bodega Bay home. Bearing a gift of two lovebirds, Melanie quickly strikes up a romance with Mitch while contending with his possessive mother and boarding at his ex-girlfriend's house. One day, during a birthday party for Mitch's younger sister, a flock of birds attacks the children in what seems to be a random incident. In fact, it signals the beginning of a massive avian assault on the residents of the town - a mysterious assault that no one can explain...and from which no one may come out alive.
Thanks to Tim Dirks for his analysis:
Novelist Evan Hunter based his screenplay upon the 1952 collection of short stories of the same name by Daphne du Maurier - Hitchcock's third major film based on the author's works (after Jamaica Inn (1939) and Rebecca (1940)). In du Maurier's story, the birds were attacking in the English countryside, rather than in a small town north of San Francisco. The film's technical wizardry is extraordinary, especially in the film's closing scene (a complex, trick composite shot) - the special visual effects of Ub Iwerks were nominated for an Academy Award (the film's sole nomination), but the Oscar was lost to Cleopatra. Hundreds of birds (gulls, ravens, and crows) were trained for use in some of the scenes, while mechanical birds and animations were employed for others.
The film's non-existent musical score is replaced by an electronic soundtrack (including simulated bird cries and wing-flaps), with Hitchcock's favorite composer Bernard Herrmann serving as a sound consultant. It was shot on location in the port town of Bodega Bay (north of San Francisco) and in San Francisco itself. Hitchcock introduced a 'fascinating new personality' for the film - his successor to Grace Kelly - a cool, blonde professional model named 'Tippi' Hedren, in her film debut in a leading role. [Hedren reprised her character in a minor supporting role, in an inferior made-for-TV sequel, The Birds II: Land's End (1994), set in the New England fishing town of Land's End. The director was Rick Rosenthal, although the standard generic pseudonym 'Alan Smithee' is found in the credits. Leads Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren are replaced by Brad Johnson and Chelsea Field.
Initially, critics were baffled when they attempted to interpret the film on a literal level and measure it against other typical disaster/horror films of its kind. The typical Hitchcock MacGuffin is the question: Why do the strange attacks occur? But the film cannot solely be interpreted that way, because as the actors in the film discover in the long discussion scene in the Tides Restaurant, there is no solid, rational reason why the birds are attacking. They are not seeking revenge for nature's mistreatment, or foreshadowing doomsday, and they don't represent God's punishment for humankind's evil.
When this is understood, the symbolic film's complex fabric makes more sense, especially if interpreted in Freudian terms. It is about three needy women (literally 'birds') - and a fourth from a younger generation - each flocking around and vying for varying degrees of affection and attention from the sole, emotionally-cold male lead, and the fragile tensions, anxieties and unpredictable relations between them. The attacks are mysteriously related to the mother and son relationship in the film - anger (and fears of abandonment or being left lonely) of the jealous, initially hostile mother surface when her bachelor son brings home an attractive young woman. Curiously, the first attack has symbolic phallic undertones - it occurs when the man and woman approach toward each other outside the restaurant in the coastal town.
On an allegorical level, the birds in the film are the physical embodiment and exteriorization of unleashed, disturbing, shattering forces that threaten all of humanity (those threatened in the film include schoolchildren, a defenseless farmer, bystanders, a schoolteacher, etc.) when relationships have become insubstantial, unsupportive, or hurtful. In a broader, more universal sense, the stability of the home and natural world environment, symbolized by broken teacups at the domestic level, is in jeopardy and becoming disordered when people cannot 'see' the dangers gathering nearby, and cannot adequately protect themselves from violence behind transparent windows, telephone booths, eyeglasses, or facades. Numerous allusions to blindness are sprinkled throughout the film (the farmer's eyes are pecked out, the children play blindman's bluff at the birthday party, the broken glasses of the fleeing schoolchild, etc.), giving the hint that the camera's voyeuristic lens (and its screen-viewing audience) is also being subjected to assault.
Abundant Trivia care of IMDB:
1) Tippi Hedren was actually cut in the face by a bird in one of the shots.
2) There is no musical score for the film except for the sounds created on the mixtrautonium, an early electronic musical instrument, by Oskar Sala, and the children singing in the school.
3) Though there is no musical score for this film, composer and Alfred Hitchcock collaborator 'Bernard Herrmann' is credited as a "sound consultant."
4) Alfred Hitchcock approached Joseph Stefano (screenwriter of Psycho (1960)) to write the script, but he wasn't interested in the story. The final screenplay (from a Daphne Du Maurier short story) was written by Evan Hunter, best known to detective story fans under his pen name "Ed McBain".
5) Alfred Hitchcock saw Tippi Hedren in a 1962 commercial aired during the "Today" (1952) show and put her under contract. In the commercial for a diet drink, she is seen walking down a street and a man whistles at her slim, attractive figure, and she turns her head with an acknowledging smile. In the opening scene of the film, the same thing happens as she walks toward the bird shop. This was an inside joke by Hitchcock.
6) The scene where Tippi Hedren is ravaged by birds near the end of the movie took a week to shoot. The birds were attached to her clothes by long nylon threads so they could not get away.
7)The film does not finish with the usual "THE END" title because Alfred Hitchcock wanted to give the impression of unending terror.
8) Tippi Hedren's daughter Melanie Griffith was given a present by Alfred Hitchcock during the filming: a doll that looked exactly like Hedren, eerily so. The creepiness was compounded by the ornate wooden box it came in, which the young girl took to be a coffin.
9) The automobile driven by Tippi Hedren is an Aston Martin DB2/4 drop-head coupe.
10) The movie features 370 effects shots. The final shot is a composite of 32 separately filmed elements.
11) This was not the first dramatization of Daphne Du Maurier's short story. It was previously adapted for radio at least twice, once starring Herbert Marshall, and again in 1954. Furthermore, it was adapted by writer James P. Cavanagh for a half-hour episode of the TV series "Danger" (1950). Cavanaugh also wrote at least five episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" (1955), including two directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and was the first writer to adapt Robert Bloch's novel of Psycho (1960) for Hitchcock's production. However, his script was jettisoned in favor of the Joseph Stefano adaptation.
12) A number of endings were being considered for this film. One that was considered would have showed the Golden Gate Bridge completely covered by birds.
13) In May 2001, the son of "The Birds" novelist Daphne Du Maurier reported that he and his wife were being terrorized by seagulls nesting outside their cottage in Cornwall, England.
14) In the film, it appears as if the schoolhouse is within the bay town limits. The frightened children are clearly shown running downhill towards the town and water. In real life, the schoolhouse used for those shots is located 5 miles southeast and inland of Bodega Bay in the separate township of Bodega, California.
15) The crow that sits on Alfred Hitchcock's shoulder in all of the promo photos was not in the movie. It was purchased after the movie had wrapped. A studio staff member bought it when he spotted the tamed bird on the shoulder of a 12 year old boy walking down the street. The boy was offered about $10, but was hesitant until he discovered why it was needed.
16) This was the first film to carry the Universal Pictures name after dropping the Universal-International name.
17) Mitch Zanich, owner of The Tides Restaurant at the time of shooting, told Hitchcock he could shoot there if the lead male in the film was named after him and Hitch gave him a speaking part in the movie. Hitchcock agreed: Rod Taylor's character was named Mitch Brenner and Mitch Zanich was given a speaking part. After Melanie is attacked by a seagull, Mitch Zanich says can be heard saying to Mitch Brenner "What happened, Mitch?"
18) Although it was never shot, another ending was scripted by Evan Hunter and sketched by Harold Michelson. The script and sketches appear as a bonus feature on the DVD version.
19) The famous poster art for the film where a woman is pictured screaming is not Tippi Hedren but is in fact Jessica Tandy taken from the scene where the birds come down the chimney.
20) When the film was aired on NBC-TV in the USA on 6 January 1968, it became the highest rated film shown on television up to that time. The record held until Love Story (1970) overtook it on 1 October 1972.
21) The climactic scene, in which Tippi Hedren's character is attacked in the bedroom, took seven days to shoot. Hedren has been quoted as saying it was "the worst week of my life". The physical and emotional tolls of filming this scene were so strong on her, production was shut down for a week afterward.
22) Rod Taylor claims that the seagulls were fed a mixture of wheat and whiskey. It was the only way to get them to stand around so much.
23) When audiences left the film's UK premiere at the Odeon, Leicester Square, London, they were greeted by the sound of screeching and flapping birds from loudspeakers hidden in the trees to scare them further.
24) Director Cameo: [Alfred Hitchcock] at the start of the film walking two dogs past the pet shop (the dogs were actually his own).
25) The sound of reel-to-reel tape being run backwards and forwards was used to help create the frightening bird squawking sounds in the film
26) Melanie wears the same green suit throughout the movie, so Tippi Hedren was provided with six identical green suits for the shoot.
27) Voted 7th Scariest Movie of all time by a poll carried out on the British public by Channel 5 and The Times in 2006.
You have to watch this trailer - Hitchcock is hysterical!!
PURE GOLD - DOES NOT NEED A REMAKE!! CAN BE BOUGHT ON EBAY FOR ABOUT $5- AND PROB IS IN YOUR DVD STORE TO RENT. DO IT!!!! Worth $16-
Alfred Hitchcock is GOD!!
This film blows my mind every time I see it - the film has not dated in 45 years, the locations, the shots, the costumes and the scares are cinematic gold and will never fade. I am shocked that Micheal Bay is remaking this starring Naomi Watts and George Clooney - NO NO NO!!! Do not touch this film - leave it as it is. It doesn't need a remake - just a re-release and it would make squillions more!
In THE BIRDS, Alfred Hitchcock's heart-pounding follow-up to PSYCHO, the director couples a tone of rigorous morality with dark humor to create a thriller that begins as a light comedy and ends as an apocalyptic allegory. Tippi Hedren (Melanie Griffith's mother) carries the picture in her first film role ever, embarking on a career as an icy-cool leading lady. Loosely based on a Daphne du Maurier story and a Santa Monica newspaper account, "Seabird Invasion Hits Coastal Homes," THE BIRDS also features groundbreaking special effects that, in 1963, surprised and delighted audiences. Wealthy reformed party girl Melanie Daniels (Hedren) enjoys a brief flirtation with lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) in a San Francisco pet shop and decides to follow him to his Bodega Bay home. Bearing a gift of two lovebirds, Melanie quickly strikes up a romance with Mitch while contending with his possessive mother and boarding at his ex-girlfriend's house. One day, during a birthday party for Mitch's younger sister, a flock of birds attacks the children in what seems to be a random incident. In fact, it signals the beginning of a massive avian assault on the residents of the town - a mysterious assault that no one can explain...and from which no one may come out alive.
Thanks to Tim Dirks for his analysis:
Novelist Evan Hunter based his screenplay upon the 1952 collection of short stories of the same name by Daphne du Maurier - Hitchcock's third major film based on the author's works (after Jamaica Inn (1939) and Rebecca (1940)). In du Maurier's story, the birds were attacking in the English countryside, rather than in a small town north of San Francisco. The film's technical wizardry is extraordinary, especially in the film's closing scene (a complex, trick composite shot) - the special visual effects of Ub Iwerks were nominated for an Academy Award (the film's sole nomination), but the Oscar was lost to Cleopatra. Hundreds of birds (gulls, ravens, and crows) were trained for use in some of the scenes, while mechanical birds and animations were employed for others.
The film's non-existent musical score is replaced by an electronic soundtrack (including simulated bird cries and wing-flaps), with Hitchcock's favorite composer Bernard Herrmann serving as a sound consultant. It was shot on location in the port town of Bodega Bay (north of San Francisco) and in San Francisco itself. Hitchcock introduced a 'fascinating new personality' for the film - his successor to Grace Kelly - a cool, blonde professional model named 'Tippi' Hedren, in her film debut in a leading role. [Hedren reprised her character in a minor supporting role, in an inferior made-for-TV sequel, The Birds II: Land's End (1994), set in the New England fishing town of Land's End. The director was Rick Rosenthal, although the standard generic pseudonym 'Alan Smithee' is found in the credits. Leads Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren are replaced by Brad Johnson and Chelsea Field.
Initially, critics were baffled when they attempted to interpret the film on a literal level and measure it against other typical disaster/horror films of its kind. The typical Hitchcock MacGuffin is the question: Why do the strange attacks occur? But the film cannot solely be interpreted that way, because as the actors in the film discover in the long discussion scene in the Tides Restaurant, there is no solid, rational reason why the birds are attacking. They are not seeking revenge for nature's mistreatment, or foreshadowing doomsday, and they don't represent God's punishment for humankind's evil.
When this is understood, the symbolic film's complex fabric makes more sense, especially if interpreted in Freudian terms. It is about three needy women (literally 'birds') - and a fourth from a younger generation - each flocking around and vying for varying degrees of affection and attention from the sole, emotionally-cold male lead, and the fragile tensions, anxieties and unpredictable relations between them. The attacks are mysteriously related to the mother and son relationship in the film - anger (and fears of abandonment or being left lonely) of the jealous, initially hostile mother surface when her bachelor son brings home an attractive young woman. Curiously, the first attack has symbolic phallic undertones - it occurs when the man and woman approach toward each other outside the restaurant in the coastal town.
On an allegorical level, the birds in the film are the physical embodiment and exteriorization of unleashed, disturbing, shattering forces that threaten all of humanity (those threatened in the film include schoolchildren, a defenseless farmer, bystanders, a schoolteacher, etc.) when relationships have become insubstantial, unsupportive, or hurtful. In a broader, more universal sense, the stability of the home and natural world environment, symbolized by broken teacups at the domestic level, is in jeopardy and becoming disordered when people cannot 'see' the dangers gathering nearby, and cannot adequately protect themselves from violence behind transparent windows, telephone booths, eyeglasses, or facades. Numerous allusions to blindness are sprinkled throughout the film (the farmer's eyes are pecked out, the children play blindman's bluff at the birthday party, the broken glasses of the fleeing schoolchild, etc.), giving the hint that the camera's voyeuristic lens (and its screen-viewing audience) is also being subjected to assault.
Abundant Trivia care of IMDB:
1) Tippi Hedren was actually cut in the face by a bird in one of the shots.
2) There is no musical score for the film except for the sounds created on the mixtrautonium, an early electronic musical instrument, by Oskar Sala, and the children singing in the school.
3) Though there is no musical score for this film, composer and Alfred Hitchcock collaborator 'Bernard Herrmann' is credited as a "sound consultant."
4) Alfred Hitchcock approached Joseph Stefano (screenwriter of Psycho (1960)) to write the script, but he wasn't interested in the story. The final screenplay (from a Daphne Du Maurier short story) was written by Evan Hunter, best known to detective story fans under his pen name "Ed McBain".
5) Alfred Hitchcock saw Tippi Hedren in a 1962 commercial aired during the "Today" (1952) show and put her under contract. In the commercial for a diet drink, she is seen walking down a street and a man whistles at her slim, attractive figure, and she turns her head with an acknowledging smile. In the opening scene of the film, the same thing happens as she walks toward the bird shop. This was an inside joke by Hitchcock.
6) The scene where Tippi Hedren is ravaged by birds near the end of the movie took a week to shoot. The birds were attached to her clothes by long nylon threads so they could not get away.
7)The film does not finish with the usual "THE END" title because Alfred Hitchcock wanted to give the impression of unending terror.
8) Tippi Hedren's daughter Melanie Griffith was given a present by Alfred Hitchcock during the filming: a doll that looked exactly like Hedren, eerily so. The creepiness was compounded by the ornate wooden box it came in, which the young girl took to be a coffin.
9) The automobile driven by Tippi Hedren is an Aston Martin DB2/4 drop-head coupe.
10) The movie features 370 effects shots. The final shot is a composite of 32 separately filmed elements.
11) This was not the first dramatization of Daphne Du Maurier's short story. It was previously adapted for radio at least twice, once starring Herbert Marshall, and again in 1954. Furthermore, it was adapted by writer James P. Cavanagh for a half-hour episode of the TV series "Danger" (1950). Cavanaugh also wrote at least five episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" (1955), including two directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and was the first writer to adapt Robert Bloch's novel of Psycho (1960) for Hitchcock's production. However, his script was jettisoned in favor of the Joseph Stefano adaptation.
12) A number of endings were being considered for this film. One that was considered would have showed the Golden Gate Bridge completely covered by birds.
13) In May 2001, the son of "The Birds" novelist Daphne Du Maurier reported that he and his wife were being terrorized by seagulls nesting outside their cottage in Cornwall, England.
14) In the film, it appears as if the schoolhouse is within the bay town limits. The frightened children are clearly shown running downhill towards the town and water. In real life, the schoolhouse used for those shots is located 5 miles southeast and inland of Bodega Bay in the separate township of Bodega, California.
15) The crow that sits on Alfred Hitchcock's shoulder in all of the promo photos was not in the movie. It was purchased after the movie had wrapped. A studio staff member bought it when he spotted the tamed bird on the shoulder of a 12 year old boy walking down the street. The boy was offered about $10, but was hesitant until he discovered why it was needed.
16) This was the first film to carry the Universal Pictures name after dropping the Universal-International name.
17) Mitch Zanich, owner of The Tides Restaurant at the time of shooting, told Hitchcock he could shoot there if the lead male in the film was named after him and Hitch gave him a speaking part in the movie. Hitchcock agreed: Rod Taylor's character was named Mitch Brenner and Mitch Zanich was given a speaking part. After Melanie is attacked by a seagull, Mitch Zanich says can be heard saying to Mitch Brenner "What happened, Mitch?"
18) Although it was never shot, another ending was scripted by Evan Hunter and sketched by Harold Michelson. The script and sketches appear as a bonus feature on the DVD version.
19) The famous poster art for the film where a woman is pictured screaming is not Tippi Hedren but is in fact Jessica Tandy taken from the scene where the birds come down the chimney.
20) When the film was aired on NBC-TV in the USA on 6 January 1968, it became the highest rated film shown on television up to that time. The record held until Love Story (1970) overtook it on 1 October 1972.
21) The climactic scene, in which Tippi Hedren's character is attacked in the bedroom, took seven days to shoot. Hedren has been quoted as saying it was "the worst week of my life". The physical and emotional tolls of filming this scene were so strong on her, production was shut down for a week afterward.
22) Rod Taylor claims that the seagulls were fed a mixture of wheat and whiskey. It was the only way to get them to stand around so much.
23) When audiences left the film's UK premiere at the Odeon, Leicester Square, London, they were greeted by the sound of screeching and flapping birds from loudspeakers hidden in the trees to scare them further.
24) Director Cameo: [Alfred Hitchcock] at the start of the film walking two dogs past the pet shop (the dogs were actually his own).
25) The sound of reel-to-reel tape being run backwards and forwards was used to help create the frightening bird squawking sounds in the film
26) Melanie wears the same green suit throughout the movie, so Tippi Hedren was provided with six identical green suits for the shoot.
27) Voted 7th Scariest Movie of all time by a poll carried out on the British public by Channel 5 and The Times in 2006.
You have to watch this trailer - Hitchcock is hysterical!!
PURE GOLD - DOES NOT NEED A REMAKE!! CAN BE BOUGHT ON EBAY FOR ABOUT $5- AND PROB IS IN YOUR DVD STORE TO RENT. DO IT!!!! Worth $16-
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Comment by K @ the Lair
This is from mum - posted with my help and tutoring in commencement to log in.
Comment by David O'Connell
Screen Fanatic
Comment by Jason King
Sydney Table
Salty Popcorn
Total Randomness
Comment by Bryn
Horrorphile
I don't think Hitchcock is immune to the remake machine.
Comment by Jason King
Sydney Table
Salty Popcorn
Total Randomness
Comment by Bryn
Horrorphile
you need to see more Hitchcock!
North by Northwest, Read Window, Vertigo and the second version of The Man Who Knew Too Much are my favourites. Brilliant filmmaking.
Comment by David O'Connell
Screen Fanatic
The next on my list would be Strangers on a Train and the very underrated Saboteur which is a brilliant film as well.
Comment by Jason King
Sydney Table
Salty Popcorn
Total Randomness
Comment by Bryn
Horrorphile