So, I have this habit of going into CEX on a very frequent basis, and buying things with complete abandon. On one such occasion, probably about a year ago, I bought The Birds, Hitchcock, you know- on DVD. Which I'd never seen before, save for a few clips in one of our film lectures in the first year of uni. And last night I finally got around to watching it- and, yeah, it was good!
(This post is also, despite how much it pains me, not going to be about the fact that the character of Annie Hayworth is clearly of the lady-loving persuasion, which is not an unpopular theory- I could literally cite published works that also make this claim- and is something that was screaming out of the television at me. Moving on!)
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| dat smirk tho |
There are 52-year-old spoilers ahead. Consider yourself warned.
I spent a good deal of the movie yelling at the characters, making up songs about how they were all going to die because of their actions, and in turn muttering "Americans", not dissimilarly to Giles from Buffy any time anyone did anything. We follow Melanie Daniels, and I'd like to say here that Tippi Hedren was pretty badass, generally speaking, in this movie, save for the initial following this creepy mysterious bloke she only just met 60 miles away to give his sister some birds. That was all a little strange, motive-wise. But you do you, Melanie. So we follow her follow this dude to his mum's house for his little sister's 11th birthday (poor Veronica Cartwright. At least she survives this one #RIPLambert) and then all aviary hell breaks loose.
No one knows why all the birds in the vicinity suddenly take a vendetta out against all humans, but everyone just sort of accepts it and really, no explanation is given. I also want to give a shoutout to the special effects of 1963 for providing me with extra entertainment. I don't want to make light of this movie, because it was good, and I'm sure it was absolutely terrifying if you didn't grow up in the age of entire movies being computer generated. And the actors did a very impressive job of overcoming the lack of any actual birds being near them, most of the time. I'm totally cool with the wideshots of bird attacks being full of painted-on birds. That's fine. But there were so many close-ups of main characters' hands getting mauled by birds and there are just, no visible injuries whatsoever and a bunch of red liquid on their skin? Is this what Psycho would have looked like in Technicolor? Because if so, praise the good Wasserman for Universal's budget constraints on that movie. Although, despite the effects of The Birds being GCSE-resemblant, I think the proposed remake reportedly floating around Hollywood would be a huge mistake. The movie totally works in spite of its SFX limits, and the story itself, of birds randomly terrorising a town, would look absolutely ridiculous in today's entertainment climate. It would have to take itself far too seriously, also need I mention the 1998 remake of Psycho?
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| This was probably the most frightening part |
Unfortunately The Birds centres around the most annoying, Oedipal family, rather than the mysterious townsfolk and lesbian schoolteachers. In fact, they kill off the lesbian schoolteacher (of course they do) and then we're stuck with the overbearing, overcaring, hugely overreacting mother, the hero-complex-ridden manchild and the whiny little sister who is exactly as whiny in the face of bird attacks as she is in the face of alien attacks. So we've killed off the interesting characters and isolated ourselves with this little family- Melanie becomes a mother figure to baby Lambert and a figure of care for Oedipus's mother, and a chaste lover for Oedipus himself, and then for some reason goes poking around in the attic and nearly gets pecked to death. And I was watching her in her uncomfortably long battle against the birds, convinced she was going to be okay, then slowly getting more and more convinced that she was going to die (very nicely done, Hitch.) This was when I was most vocal at my television, angry that they were killing off all the interesting female characters. But my anger was unwarranted because The Oedipuses (Oedipi?), manage to retrieve her from Bird Hell, dress her wounds- also I totally thought she died in this part; she was talking and then just went completely limp. So don't be fooled like I was!- and then, it is implied, took her to a hospital.
And that's how the movie ends, with me screaming at Oedipus because he decided to venture outside, walking through swarms of birds, and then the twisted little family quite literally drive off into the sunset. (At which I said "Oh. That's the end? That's the end. Okay then.") Maybe they survive. Maybe no one survives. Honestly I don't care if any of them do. But it is a good movie.
