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roger1 (3612)
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A Group of TV Commercials for The Birds, From 1963, On YouTube
Not OT: Group of 1963 TV Commercials for The Birds, On YouTube
Has the Schwarzenegger-Stallone Feud Reignited?
The Stallone-Schwarzenegger Feud Reignites?
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"Play Misty for Me" (1971) -- The Slasher That Wasn't Really A Slasher
Happy Halloween, 2024
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Beautiful woman. I remember her most as Rod Taylor's love interest in the American Warner Brothers production, "Hotel" (1967.)
"Is it possible to read The Birds as a film about the danger of nuclear Armageddon and the need for love and reconciliation?"
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It's possible to read any film as a film about anything you want it to be about.
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Yeah, but I'm pretty sure that Hitchcock gave interviews in 1963 (and later, in Hitchocck/Truffaut of 1968 in America) where he SPECIFCALLY referenced The Birds as a "nuclear bomb analogy." Other places he said it was a "doomsday film" or an "Armageddon film" but he was specific to nuclear war in some interviews. After all the Cuban Missile Crisis had occurred in October 1962 and The Birds premiered only a few months later in March of 1963((Easter, having missed a Christmas 1962 release date).
So nuclear war and "the end of the world" was on everybody's mind. "The Birds" came out in 1963. Dr. Strangelove, Fail Safe, and Seven Days in May came out in 1964. The Bedford Incident(Poitier and Widmark) came out in 1965. The Big Boom was on everybody's minds and The Birds was part of it(Hitchocck also referenced the 1959 post-nuke war movie On the Beach in interviews.)
Ackroyd could do no wrong that decade.
He headlined the lousy "Doctor Detroit" in 1983, but landed the very sexy and hot Donna Dixon from the cast(he played an amateur pimp) and they stayed married for decades. They revently announced that they have split -- but will not divorce.
And he took a small supporting role in "Driving Miss Daisy" for a cut of the film. He made big money AND he got an Oscar nom.
The 80s were a helluva decade for "nice" Dan Ackroyd -- riding the coattails of funnier SNL stars and lucking into Donna Dixon and an Oscar nom.
There's very little Dan Akroyd is involved with that he doesn't praise to high heaven.
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Yeah. He's one of those good "cheerleader" stars -- now faded, but what a resume -- always good with an uplifting quote. Chevy Chase...not so much.
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It's part of the reason most people who work with him have such praise for him. Chevy Chase complained about Nothing but Trouble but came back to talk about how good Akroyd is a s a person.
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Well, there you go. One wonders, given the "mental demons" that haunted Chase for years (evidently some of his insults of others are almost a "Tourette's" scenario)...if Chase WISHED he could be as nice as Ackroyd.
Chase and Ackroyd made a better movie that "Nothing But Trouble" -- "Spies Like Us" under the direction of John Landis(who was still working but under a cloud after the "Twilight Zone" tragedy.) And therein lies a story.
At the end of the 80's, the two most successful movie stars at the box office were: Harrison Ford and Dan Ackroyd. Ford makes sense: three Indy Jones movies, two Star Wars movies, and some "stray hits" like Witness and Working Girl. (Blade Runner? Not so much.)
But ACKROYD? He had been funny on TV, but less so as a movie personality. Yet, looked at the OTHER SNL talents he worked with in the 80s:
1980: Belushi, The Blues Brothers. BIG HIT (by John Landis)
1981: Belushi, Neighbors (not such a big hit.)
1982 (Belushi dies of a drug overdose.)
1983: Eddie Murphy, Trading Places (and Ackroyd has top billing.)
1984: Ghostbusters (Ackroyd is OK, but Bill Murray -- in a role written for Belushi) rules the show.
1984: Ackroyd does a one scene cameo with -- Harrison Ford! -- in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
1985: Spies Like Us. (Chase and Ackroyd were funny together -- a bit like Hope and Crosby and Bob Hope actually APPEARS in the film.)
1989: Ghostbusters II with Murray again.
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Maybe it'd be more accurate to say that the Birds heavily influence Night, which then influenced a lot of horror filmmakers who followed.
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And think that's accurate to say but -- Hitchcock has to be given his due. So OFTEN, he did movies that became "definitive" of their type. Psycho -- the slasher movie. The Birds...animals gone amok...sieges. The Man Who Knew Too Much (BOTH versions) -- the kidnapping of a child AND a "stop the assassination" plot. Etc.
One of the great "siege" scenes in movie history is done almost all JUST by sound in The Birds -- near the end. We only SEE a seagull break thorugh a window to peck Rod Taylor's hand(in close-up, doubled?) bloody.
Of course, NOTLD would pretty much create a whole horror subgenre.
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Aboslutely. Prior to the very graphic 1968 NOTLD, "zombie movies" were specific to the Caribbean on the screen (in some Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis movies for comedy) and the zombies were unmarked "natives" in a trance. The more grisly and gruesome NOTLD gave us rotted-out human corpses rising from their graves and eating human flesh and needing a bullet through the brain to be killed and turning OTHER people into zombies by biting them. And pretty much ALL zombie movies have a "siege" element. They raided a shopping mall in "Dawn of the Dead."
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Apocalyptic movies that came after the Birds really seemed to take a lot from this movie.
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Yes..Hitchcock referenced The Birds in some interviews as his "Judgment Day movie." On the other hand, in the 70s when disaster movies(The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake, The Towering Inferno) came out , Hitchcock said "I already made a disaster movie. It was called The Birds." Hitchcock went on to note that The Birds shared with other disaster movies "how suddenly the individual problems of people no longer mattered in the face of life-and-death disaster.
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Especially Night of the Living Dead. I wonder if George Romero mentioned it as an influence in any interviews?
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I don't know of any -- but the connection is clearly here. The 1968 reviews of Night of the Living Dead played up a review that said "the scariest movie since Psycho" -- but really The Birds was the big influence.
We are talking here of "the siege movie" -- a house under siege and the terrors affiliated with "outside menacers" breaking through to kill US. Terrifying. After NOTLD, a major "siege movie" was Sam Peckinpah's "Straw Dogs" (based on a novel called The Siege of Trencher's Farm) climaxed with Yank Dustin Hoffman and his British wife Susan George holding off a horde of thugs at their home.
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PS. I've noted that Psycho has "the greatest logo in movie history," and why, history wise. Also, those incredibly powerful slashed letters.
Weirdly, The Birds got a famous logo, too but it does little to communicate anything. "The Birds" combines capitol letters and lower case letters, but in a rather whimsical looking way -- almost Disney-esque.The letters are a little "off kilter," too. I suppose it was saying "these birds are a little wacky."
PPS. Here's a bonus, not sure it is worth an entire post.
On YouTube I found a one-minute snippet of actor Barry Foster being interviewed in 1980 about Frenzy. It was a BBC show and they actually showed the opening scene with the naked body floating in from the Thames, buttocks exposed. What Hitchocck couldn't show on the SCREEN in Psycho (naked buttocks in the shower scene) could be shown on TV in 1980 in Britain.
Anyway, they show the clip, it ends and the interviewer says to Foster:
Interviewer: And who was the fellow in the bowler hat?
Foster: That was Hitch, of course.
Interviewer: And that murder victim? Who dunnit?
Foster smiles amiably and says "It was me."
It was me. An oddly funny way to fess up to committing some truly horrible murders(of women) as Hitchcock's most sickening psychopath
Less clear: I remember when I saw The Birds at the theater and saw the opening credits , thinking: "this is just like the TV commercials." Word. It CAME BACK, that memory. Thus Hitchocck and his commercials had SATURATED the movie going public with those birds a squawking.
Clear: I've menetioned this before. Our family went into The Birds late -- just in time to see Tippi get pecked in the motorboat. We disobeyed the Psycho rule: don't come in after the movie has started. But we DID come in late, we DID have to sit through a second feature and The Birds starting again , and I DID think the movie sure was boring until she got pecked in the boat.
Less clear: the TV commercials, all grouped together, and with Hitchcock talking and Tippi screaming and -- above all, that announcer always yelling "Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds!" I vaguely remember ALL of that and I think it demonstates just how BIG and MAJOR was in that period from Psycho to The Birds. How ironic that it all pretty much collapsed right after that. Marnie in 1964(the year the Beatles showed up in the US and movies like Dr. Strangelove changed the tone of movies). The TV show goes off the air(at Hitchcock's request, it was still a hit) in 1965. Then Torn Curtain and Topaz to finish the decade.
At the MOVIES, it got bad for Hitch. But not on network TV: From 1965 to 1968, he got BIG TV ratings for the premieres of To Catch a Thief, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho(on local channels only) and..The Birds...which became the highest rated movie on network TV to that time.
Those old TV commercials from '63 were still working their magic.
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