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Psycho and Elmer Gantry and The Birds Is Coming!

posted 6 years ago by ecarle (14979)
3 replies | jump to latest

A little trivia here...

One of the most famous things Alfred Hitchcock did in his peak popularity days was to slap this come-on on posters and in newspapers, and in radio and TV ads:

"The birds is coming!"

Small "b" birds. With Hitchcock in the ad, pointing at crows flying in a menacing flock. The grammatical error added comedy to the implied horror, and there is an aprocryphal tale that some young Universal worker bee raised his hand and said to Hitchcock "Sir, don't you mean the birds ARE coming?" at a meeting where Hitch unveiled the slogan. Got a slow burn in return.

I'm old enough to remember those ads, young enough at the time that I found them funny and exciting. "The birds is coming!" was a catch phrase to conjure with in 1963. You couldn't WAIT for them to come!

But: zipping through some microfiche research on Psycho in 1960 papers, I discovered -- in the LA Times and in the SPORTS section, the following print ad in 1960:

PSYCHO is coming!

The word PSYCHO was famously slashed as The Greatest Movie Logo of All Time, and that word dominated the ad. It wasn't that "Psycho was coming!" It was that PSYCHO(slashed word like the slashed people in the movie) was coming!"

In Los Angeles in 1960, Psycho had been coming for quite some time. It had opened in NYC and other East Coast cities in June of 1960...but didn't reach LA until early August. That twist ending spoiler evidently held for almost two months! Word didn't travel. But I think word of the excitement of Psycho travelled...so a print ad...in the Sports section...of an August 1960 LA Times issue....created tremendous "wanna see value": PSYCHO is coming!

But wait, there's more: while skipping through that summer 1960 microfiche of LA Times pages, I came upon this come on:

SINNERS! Elmer Gantry is Coming!"

Now, here was a variant on the "BLANK is coming!" motif. Elmer Gantry(played by Burt Lancaster in his one Oscar-winning role) is an evangelist, coming to get sinners. And we are being CALLED sinners, in the ad ("SINNERS!") But I assume 1960 readers of this ad just laughed. Sinners, are we? Well, then what is Elmer Gantry? A con man? A womanizer? PSHAW.

Anyway, let's hear it for the "BLANK is coming! motif:

The birds is coming!....most famous, most funny.

SINNERS! Elmer Gantry is coming...we are invited in on the joke of the story.

PSYCHO is coming! And with that slashed logo, we just KNOW that blood and gore is on the menu.

Any other "BLANK is coming!" titles out there in movieland?

I do remember one MOVIE with that title:

"Valdez is Coming" -- starring Burt Lancaster....

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

Any other "BLANK is coming!" titles out there in movieland?

I'll have to think.... there must be a few.

'Winter is Coming' is a key advertising theme for Game of Thrones (it's the motto of the main, audience identification family/House on the show).

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

Bingo!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078350/mediaviewer/rm1993678080

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

There ya go! And The Swarm was found to be a follow up to The Birds in certain ways...you know, The Birds and The Bees.

I'll add in passing that I saw The Swarm first run and I considered it one of the worst movies ever(with lines like "Why? The bees have always been our friends!")....it was part of the ignominious collapse of Irwin Allen after the twin peaks of The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. Michael Caine in his "I'll work in anything" period, worked for Irwin on this and then on the quite bad Poseidon sequel(with Sally Field! in the year she won the Oscar for Norma Rae! Because Burt Reynolds said she should!) and was almost finished as a star til he turned bad for DePalma in Dressed to Kill. After refusing to turn bad for Hitchcock in Frenzy.

But I digress.

I suppose that "the birds is coming!" - a very simple idea , really -- goes right up there with the Psycho admission policy and, perhaps "Que Sera Sera," as part of the "Hitchcock marketing mystique" -- marketing devices that became part of the movies they sold.

By the way, the Mad Magazine parody of The Birds("For the Birds") reproduced Hitchcock's "the birds is coming!" billboard and had someone scrawl on it:

"....and good grammar in advertising has WENT!"