Hitchcock's The Birds
 

Guess what I did the other night!? I went to see Hitchcock's The Birds on the big screen in an old theater just as if it was in the day - a little more punked up but you know what I mean. It was great! Just great. The color was fab in that subtle retro way and the film in good shape. It was good to see Tippi and Rod, and the the the those birds. Tippi was quite the girl - wearing her high heels and mink in the motorboat, not a hair out of place. She epitomizes the girl detective that I will never be. Hmpf.

I vaguely remember reading the DuMaurier story, but I dont remember a reason given for the birds' murderous behavior and the film gives no explanation. Just wondering - what do you make of it?

I've seen The Birds 4 or 5 times, but never on the big screen. That sounds like a lot of fun.

Hitchcock tossed the DuMaurier explanation of the bird behavior. Knowing the cause of the birds' strange behavior in his film doesn't really matter to me.

Well, maybe the remake will explain it...

There was no explaination for the birds behaviour in the film. It wouldn't have been nearly as creepy if there had been some sort of explaination.

Just a side note about this film... A few years ago someone gave me the Hitchcock collection on DVD. Thinking that it would be cool to introduce my son to some of these classic films I decided that The Birds would be a good one to show him. My thinking was that, this film isn't *that* scary.

Unfortunately, I may have miscalculated just how scary The Birds could be to a five-year-old.

He and my wife still take the piss out of me for making him watch it.

This movie scared the piss out of me when I was a kid...I saw it on the big screen, too, during one of it's revivals in the '70s...

I wasn't 5, but i saw it as a kid and laughed at it. I was 9 or 10. I also read the story as a child. I liked that much more. To me, the story was scarier.

Has anyone seen that Peter Greenaway made-for-TV film about some unexplained yet huge event somehow involving birds? Very weird.

p.s. Movies i thought were scary: The usual Dracula & Frankenstein stuff + "2001" & "Battleship Potemkin".

And I agree with Charlatan, knowing why the birds were behaving the way they were would have made it less frightening.

I agree.

Oh yes, I agree too. But dont you wonder - what caused those birds to bezerk out? Birds of all feathers flocking together to pick and peck at us humans. Whats up with that?

And seeing the film so recently I noticed when Tippi first had an inkling of the bird-o-rama to come she seemed to whooze or look a little stunned with premonition or something. What was with that?

Hitchcock has always had that way about making seemingly harmless things into the most horrify things ever.

I recall as a small child being told, "You're too young to watch this, go play in the other room" but I watched it anyway right at the part where the woman finds that mans eyes pecked out.


I have completely loathed seagulls and black birds ever since....

I also recall reading a short story in high school that had inspired the movie, wasn't explained why the birds attacked in the story either.

Tippi looked kind of stunned and dazed through the whole movie if I remember correctly. Hitchcock liked those far off, remote looking blondes, lol.

i think the birds is as creepy as it is in part because the use of backward bird noises. an excellent early tape music experryment.

i didnt know peter greenaway was still doing stuff...

Is it this, maybe?

http://www.epinions.com/content_171005152900

Sounds bizarre...

As usual roachboy, you are right on. Not just with the backward bird noises, but just the bird noise and the lack of any other noise. Toward the end, after the humor of the beginning and in the full horror, there is one particularly long, very long scene that has no noise other than the birds. It is terrifying. Brilliant.

What's brilliant about Hitchcock is what he withholds, what he doesn't show. The "why" of The Birds is that way. In Rope, everything from the grisly contents of the trunk in to the homosexual subtext happens in the domain of "obvious but pointedly ignored". Maybe the best example of that is the famous shower scene from Psycho, which is one of the most intense murder scenes in the history of film, and is almost certainly LESS graphic than how you remember it. It's all about framing with Hitchcock--the movie frame as a window looking out on a world where what's shown and what's not are carefully constructed and are equally important. LITERALLY, in the case of Rear Window, where Jimmy Stewart's window is exactly the same proportions as a movie screen.

I saw the latest "Final Cut" version of Blade Runner on the big screen a couple nights ago. AWESOME. The way Scott uses retina-flash to signal who's real and who's artificial is gorgeous and brilliant.

awesome...one should try to get to more of these types of things.

one of my first dates with Skogafoss was to see a Psycho on the big screen at some arthouse here in NYC. It was a bit more campy, especially the trial, than I remembered but the work as a whole was just captivating.

rope is fantastic, even if in the end it comes across as the revenge of the petit bourgeois against the nietzscheans---like most things, this is hiding in plain sight.

the games that take off from rear window are legion--you are watching a film, voyeur, about a voyeur, so your interests are in a sense the same as those of the other, less three-dimensional voyeur--henry, portrait of a serial killer does quite disturbing things with this trick, using it to turn the conventions of a slasher film back onto you as a viewer and by extension back onto themselves---if you catch the trick. if you don't, then everything can proceed as before. except maybe not.

REmake? There's going to be a remake? I missed that one. Do you know who is supposed to play the main characters?

Naomi Watts and Robert Knepper are to play the main role. It's due to release in 2009.

I don't think he does. I saw the avian faux-documentary high above Cayuga's waters a long long time ago.

Oy. They'll probably do CGI zombie birds....

i look forward to a version of the birds even worse that soderberg's version of solaris.

Hey! It's produced by Michael Bay. You know it will be amazing!

Will it be worse that Gus Van Sant's shot for shot remake of Psycho?

(.... which won that year's Oscar for Most Unnecessary Feature Film...)

So I saw Vertigo at Cinema 21 a week or so ago. It was alright. Vertigo has never been one of my favorite Hitchcock's, but I didn't want the opportunity to pass for the big looksee. I think Im going to make it one of my goals to see each of his films (at least his commercial works) as he wanted them seen - at the movie house on the big screen.

My wife really likes Vertigo. I'm not as big of a fan. I like many of his other films better (Rear Window, North by Northwest, The Birds, 39 Steps, etc.). You must have some great theaters where you live. I would expect it to be hard to see many of his films on the big screen even if you did restrict your viewings to his "commercial" works. He directed 60+ films. I've probably see 25 or so and that involved mining Turner Classic Movies with my tivo.

This is an old post, but I noticed over the weekend that NxNW is playing on a big screen downtown.
Im going one night this week after work.
Ill eat dinner at the cinema,
and hope someone as handsome as Mr. Grant sits next to me.

Cant wait for the lonely intersection scene! That plane is going to buzz big!

I realize that it's late, but it seems I missed this discussion the first time around.

I would like to heartily agree with the opinions expressed herein. Hitchcock was a master of horror -- to hell with Saw and it's 80 bastard children, I want more movies in they style of Psycho, The Birds or Vertigo.

I saw The Birds when I was a younger lad, maybe 13. It definitely scared the bejeezus out of me.