The Magic of Movies

9.5/10 stars - “The Birds” - Alfred Hitchock

When she was playing the role of Cathy in The Birds, child actress Veronica Cartwright asked Alfred Hitchcock why the audience wouldn’t realize that most of the birds in one scene were fakes. Hitchock explained that because there were some real birds, and they would move, the eye would be drawn forcefully to them and the audience wouldn’t look directly at the fake ones. This, he explained is the “magic of movies”.

The Birds, is notable on so many levels, one of which is incredible technical brilliance; much of The Birds was actually shot on sound-stages, rather than on location and except the driving scene this is completely unnoticeable Hitchcock loathed location work because the lighting and weather never were what was desired.

A clear example of this can be found with the clever use of an extremely precise precise match-cut, in the following scene the camera pans to follow Tippi Hedren’s character crossing a real street, as she walks behind the sign the shot invisibly cuts to a precise replica of that sign in a sound stage, and continues panning as if nothing had happened, showing her enter a prop storefront.

Watch the subtitles carefully to see when the cut occurs, the celebrated directorial cameo appears here so it’s highlighted also. All of this was done without the use of digital Chroma-Key technology, manually, the old-fashioned way with traveling mattes and rotoscopes. There was an incredible number of effect shots, most impressively, the scenes with bird attacks where almost all entirely effects, there were few or no actual birds.

What is particularly evident to the viewer is the total lack of “fringe” around wings, hair and the like. Classical blue-screen technology was prone to having problems with blue halos appearing around hair or other fuzzy bits. Stanley Kubrick’s famous solution to this was to use front projection. Hitchcock’s used a Disney developed process in which a special sodium arc lamp was used, in this technique two sets of film stock were used, one sensitive only to the sodium frequencies one sensitive to normal light, the sodium “silhouette” was then used to create an extraordinarily precise matte.

It is quite a minimalist film, there is not even any incidental music, great attention was paid to the sound of the film, though, but the closest thing the film has to music is an electronically manipulated soundtrack of bird calls and wing noises.

The Birds is a mood piece, rather than being overtly horrific (except for one or two scenes), it starts off as a seeming screwball comedy then sharply diverges into the macabre, alternating between tension and terror.

Nearly every scene is memorable, the scenes in the restaurant are amazing and are the perfect example of the films style. In-between the waves of intense attacks the occurrences are of a largely banal nature, the humans discuss small things then the terror of what is happening sets in. If all the birds of the world turned against humanity… how could it defend itself?

That of course is the true impact of the film, the intense realism, never does the film actually explain why the birds are doing this, although there are some relatively obvious possible interpretations.

The ending is ultra-tense, surreal, terrifying and vexing. It’s best watched rather than explained.

Of course, no film is perfect (yet) and there are two weaknesses in this one. The first is the dreadfully unrealistic driving scene; as mentioned before, Hitchcock despised location work, this and the complexity of filming these shots for real, led him to create the driving effect with mattes as described previously. Unfortunately there is no substitute for the real thing in this case, and the results are laughable.

The other, and more serious problem is Tippi Hedren herself, this was her first film role, her previous work had been as a model and she acts like one throughout. This is a subjective call, she is cast as a well-off superficial society girl and a deep and complex portrayal would be highly incorrect. Regardless, the skill of her acting leaves something to be desired in many scenes.

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