The Birds

Alfred Hitchcock’s *The Birds* (1963) begins with a small act of pursuit. In a San Francisco pet shop, socialite Melanie Daniels meets lawyer Mitch Brenner, who is looking for lovebirds for his younger sister. Melanie buys a pair and drives to Mitch’s family home in Bodega Bay to deliver them. After she crosses the bay by boat and leaves the birds at the house, a gull strikes her on the head. The attack seems isolated at first. It is not.

Tippi Hedren plays Melanie in her film debut, opposite Rod Taylor as Mitch. Jessica Tandy plays his protective mother, Lydia, while Veronica Cartwright plays his sister, Cathy. Suzanne Pleshette appears as Annie Hayworth, a schoolteacher who once had a relationship with Mitch. Melanie’s visit brings her into this uneasy family circle just as ordinary birds begin behaving in terrifying ways.

At Cathy’s birthday party, gulls dive at the children. Later, crows gather silently behind Melanie outside Annie’s school; when the children leave, the birds attack them. In the town center, another assault contributes to a fire at a gas station. Hitchcock shifts between sudden violence and long periods of waiting, making the sight of birds perched on a roof or a telephone wire increasingly threatening. The danger reaches Mitch’s house, where the family boards up the windows and doors, only for Melanie to discover birds inside an upstairs room.

The film was adapted by screenwriter Evan Hunter from Daphne du Maurier’s short story “The Birds,” first published in 1952. The two works share the central idea of unexplained attacks by birds, but the film uses different characters and relocates the action to coastal California. Its attacks combined trained live birds, mechanical birds and photographic effects. The visual effects earned an Academy Award nomination.

*The Birds* has no conventional orchestral score. Electronic bird sounds, developed with Oskar Sala and Rémi Gassmann, take on much of the role music might otherwise play. Hitchcock also makes a brief appearance near the beginning, leaving the pet shop with his two dogs.

The ending refuses to explain the birds’ behavior. Mitch helps the injured Melanie into a car, and the family drives away slowly through a landscape crowded with birds. Even the lovebirds go with them. The film offers no discovery that restores order, and no assurance that leaving Bodega Bay means leaving the attacks behind. Its final image gives the characters a way out of the house, but not a clear way out of the danger.