Bird Crap

When I found Vertigo to be a big disappointment upon seeing it recently, I decided to take a bit of a break from Alfred Hitchcock films. I picked the wrong movie to come back to, when I decided to give The Birds a chance.

This is a movie that has not aged well at all, in my opinion. Even trying to allow for 45-year-old visual effects that couldn't hope to capture any of the realism we'd expect today, the movie is dated from top to bottom.

The movie begins with the sort of laborious pacing that has made me shy away from so many films of decades past. It takes a full hour for anything to really get up and running. Up until that point, we must instead content ourselves with what, to today's mindset, seems to me like one of the stranger love stories imaginable.

After a chance meeting with a charming man in a pet store, Our Young Heroine decides to pursue him. That's putting it kindly. By any lens my modern sensibilities can put to it, she becomes a stalker. She has a connection run his license plate number so she can get a name. She tracks down his apartment. Upon learning he's traveled upstate to the countryside for the weekend, she decides to follow.

Things getting even more peculiar from there, as people proceed to essentially aid her in her stalking in a way that traps the film as a product of its time. The local post office gives her the man's home address, helpfully mentions the younger sister he lives with, and gives the home address of the girl's school teacher. The school teacher happily provides our stalker heroine with the girl's name, and a room to stay in for the night. Someone helps her charter a boat so she can sneak out across the bay toward the man's house, even after she specifically tells him she wants the boat so it's less likely she'll be seen coming. She then sneaks into his house to leave a gift. And upon finding it, the object of her "affections" finds it all endearing.

Folks, Alfred Hitchcock may have thought he was making a movie about killer birds, but in my opinion, he missed out on the chance to make Fatal Attraction some 25 years before its time. It's just mind-bogglingly weird.

Finally, the attack of the title characters begins, but things don't get any more interesting. Action arrives, but logic takes a permanent vacation. Sometimes the birds will attack; sometimes they won't. Sometimes they attack with enough ferocity to kill (non-main characters); sometimes they just scratch you up a little (main characters). People who are safe indoors (relatively) decide to head outside for absolutely no reason other than to have a little episode of "terror," to then run right back inside the very building they just left, having accomplished nothing to help themselves or further the plot. (That's the famous "phone booth scene.")

The film feels like a bit of an overreach for Hitchcock, rather like when this generation's would-be Hitchcock, M. Night Shyamalan, made The Happening. Small, more intimate suspense seems to be where both thrive, but The Birds tries to portray a much larger problem, and the scope seems beyond him. We're even deprived of a good Bernard Herrmann score here -- Hitchcock decided to make this movie with no music.

And it's all capped off with one of the biggest "you mean that's it?!" endings I've ever seen on a movie. No resolution, no explanations, no nothing. Because the movie was made in the 60s, no end credits. Not even a "The End." It just sort of seems to run out of film.

I simply couldn't find anything to like about this movie, other than that it made Vertigo seem brilliant to me by comparison. It may be a classic, but I must rate The Birds an F.