![]() Hitchcock, known for casting strong leading men such as Cary Grant and James Stewart, cast the Australian-born actor who’d first gained fame in The Time Machine (1960). Rod Taylor is Mitch Brenner, a San Francisco lawyer who spends weekends back home in Bodega Bay with his mother and sister. Tippi Hedren plays the character Melanie Daniels. From the moment in 1961 when he spotted the beautiful blonde model in a diet drink commercial, Hitchcock had his heart set on Hedren, and only Hedren, to play the female lead. Tippi Hedren, in her acting debut, stars as spoiled socialite Melanie Daniels. Hitchcock is shown in his typically droll Master of Ceremonies pose as he proclaims it’s possibly the scariest film he’s ever made-and remember, this is his first film after the legendarily terrifying Psycho. The centerpiece of this poster is a drawing that depicts the climactic scene where Tippi Hedren is mercilessly attacked by a swarm of gulls after she innocently wandered into the attic seeking the source of some rustling noises she’d heard. Movie Poster Original theatrical poster for The Birds. In a supreme irony, Daphne Du Maurier’s son claims to have been attacked by hostile seagulls at an English coastal resort in the early 2000s. In the town of Bodega-which is near Bodega Bay-farmers reportedly told Hitchcock about how crows had plucked out the eyes of newborn lambs, possibly inspiring the scene in The Birds where a farmer has his eyes pecked out. The scene where the birds invade the house through the Brenners’ chimney may have been inspired by an April 1960 incident in La Jolla, CA, in which hundreds of Vaux Swifts invaded a married couple’s house through the chimney and wreaked havoc. After some research, it was revealed that the attacking birds were sooty shearwaters who had feasted on nearby anchovies and were likely driven insane by nerve-damaging toxins in the contaminated food. It says that when flashlight-wielding citizens went outside in the middle of the night to see what was going on, hostile birds drove them right back into their houses. On Augthe Santa Cruz Sentinel newspaper blared with the headline “ Seabird Invasion Hits Coastal Homes.” It claimed that “millions” of birds smashed into cars and buildings in the tiny town of Capitola and even attempted to enter houses. The birds was also inspired by a real-life bird attack. Daphne Du Maurier was reportedly displeased with the film version of The Birds. None of the characters share the same names as those in the novella, either. Otherwise, Hitchcock hired Evan Hunter to write a screenplay based in America rather than England, and with a screwball-comedy subplot that consumes the film’s first hour-an element that is entirely missing in the story. The only thing that Hitchcock’s film shares in common with Daphne Du Maurier’s is the theme of birds attacking without explanation. However, the screenplay is almost entirely different from the novella. The Birds is loosely based on a novella from Daphne Du Maurier. And whereas the ending of the film is unclear, in the novella one is made certain that the world is ending. “The Birds” was the name of a 1952 novella by author Daphne Du Maurier that centered on the Hockens, a farming family who lived in rural England where the community is suddenly beset with waves of violent attacks who are so set on destruction that they often kill themselves in the process. ![]() In some ways, the movie is based on a book. I’ll also present analysis and theories not only from film critics and academics, but from Hitchcock himself, and the origins of the movie. In this essay we’ll explain the meaning and symbolism behind those mysteriously angry birds. The Birds is the first end-of-the-world movie in modern American cinema.Īlthough the film seems to leave a lasting impression on everyone who’s ever seen it, many people express frustration that there is no happy ending and that the film doesn’t beat you over the head with a message. At the end, you’re left hanging, which was precisely Hitchcock’s intent. It builds up the tension more slowly than Psycho did, but once the bird attacks start, they keep happening and get worse each time. Federico Fellini called it an “apocalyptic poem.” The Birds is also more disturbing than Psycho because there’s no resolution at the end-in fact, the film doesn’t end at all. Whereas Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) can rightly be called the first modern horror film, The Birds (1963) is probably the first modern end-of-the-world film.
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