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roger1's Replies
The "it's the end of the world!" segment in the diner is pretty on the nose, surely. The god-like view of the town of Bodega Bay going up in flames is very suggestive, as well. The end of the film with the ray of sunshine peeking through ominous clouds makes a lot more sense when you look at it through the lens of apocalypse and (maybe, if we're lucky) salvation.
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I think all of those elements "work" for the kind of "art film event film" that Hitchcock was trying to make here. The "end of the world" guy is at once comic relief AND a serious spokesman for that point. The God Like View shot is one of the most spectacular shots in all of Hitchocck(and The Birds has more where that came from. And the ray of light.)
Look, a lot of skeptics contend that the birds COULD be defeated: with guns, cannons, TENNIS RACKETS(hey, why not?) hell, maybe nukes.
But they also very well could NOT be defeated. The bird expert lady says it "Why, if they all flocked together, we wouldn't have a chance." Indeed. The birds are willing to DIE (some of them) to fly into electric power stations(at the Brenner house, for instance.) They could take out power plants, cut off food supplies, shut down hospitals, plunge the world into death via starvation and thirst.
The Birds only made about half as much as Psycho. Various reasons -- too long at the beginning, not scary enough -- but also: that ending: unresolved AND bleak for the future.
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I mean, the love birds being the only avian creatures that don't attack has to mean SOMETHING.
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Absolutely. I think Hitchcock knew he was going to end The Birds without a REAL conclusion(ie the Army blows all the birds to bits, the end.) So he had to offer "signs of hope" to the audience: the love birds; Kathy's advocacy FOR the love birds; Mitch's acceptance OF the love birds.
And how Lydia accepts Melanie as a "daughter" and Melanie accepts Lydia as a "mother." A HUMAN conclusion there. And indeed 'the ray of sunlight" through the cloudy skies. MAYBE the humans will make it(but maybe they won't -- the nuclear war analogy made clear.)
Keep in mind that script pages and storyboards show that Hitchcock intended The Birds to last about 10 more minutes -- a "car chase" out of Bodega Bay(as the birds rip apart the tarp roof of Melanie's convertible), the birds can't follow. But the family reaches SF and ..The Golden Gate Bridge is covered with birds.
Hitch cut that more for budget reasons that "bummer" reasons....but that surely could have launched "The Birds 2: San Francisco Under Siege."
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Regardless, I think there must be something deeper Hitchcock had in mind with The Birds that isn't discussed a great deal.
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Yes, very much so. And...."I have a theory."
My theory splits into two parts:
a. Hitchcock wanted "Oscar love" -- to make a film that might finally get him the Best Director Oscar and maybe a Best Picture Oscar again(Rebecca won Best Picture, but he didn't win Best Director for that film. An outrage.) A movie with "serious themes and serious characters" might turn the trick
b. Hitchcock wanted to emulate all those "foreign film art directors" (foreign TO America and Hollywood) like Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa, Truffaut by making an "art film" which didn't necessarily "tie the plot up perfectly" but remained open ended.
I have some support for the "Oscar based theory" on my side: The man who wrote the screenplay for The Birds, Evan Hunter, said that Hitchcock took him into his office when they first started work on the film and showed him the wall with his five(and only five) Best Director Oscar Nomination plaques: Rebecca, Lifeboat, Spellbound, Rear Window and the most recent, Psycho. "Always a bridesmaid, never a bride," Hitch told Hunter. Perhaps setting the stage for an Oscar-worthy screenplay?
Also, when promoting The Birds, Hitchcock kept dismissing his characters from Psycho (quite wrongly I thought) saying things like this:
"Well, the characters in the second half of Psycho are merely figures. In The Birds, each character has depth and connection to the themes of the story."
Eh, I don't know. I've always like the characters in Psycho better than in The Birds but again -- I feel Hitchcock trying for Oscar here. Its why the characters spend a LOT of time talking about their lives and get hysterical a lot .
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That being said, the events of 1962 must have made a significant on Hitchcock, as he returned to that very topic a few years later with "Topaz".
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Yes..and in between The Birds and Topaz(less the non-political Marnie), Hitchcock took on nuclear issues with Torn Curtain -- in which Paul Newman plays a NUCLEAR scientist working on weapons and anti-weapons. Torn Curtain also took on the very bleak idea of "the Iron Curtain" in East Germany -- "free" persons on one side of a wall, and "oppressed" people on the other side. People were shot trying to climb that wall to the "free" side. Torn Curtain posits Paul Newman and Julie Andrews trapping themselves in the "oppressed side" and escaping (by other means than the wall) to the free side.
So, you could say that The Birds, Torn Curtain, and Topaz were "Hitchcock's nuclear trilogy" and that the director who had taken on World Warr II as a theme in the 30s and 40s, was now taking on the nuclear age in the 60s (plus, unamed Commiunists were the villains in The Man Who Knew Too Much '56 and North by Northwest.)
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I had no idea Hitchcock even made those statements. So, thanks for bringing that to light.
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You are welcome. All my years of obscure reading sometimes pay off. Ha.
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(Looking at the thread above me over several years, i have responded both as ecarle and my current name, roger1. Both are the same. I lost ecarle and can't get it back for now.)
Christomacin wrote:
So, my reading of the film was seemingly correct, even if the timing of the Cuban Missile Crisis was coincidental.
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Yes -- correct. Yes--the Cuban Missile Crisis was pretty coincidental -- about 6 months before the release of The Birds, which began filmlng BEFORE the Cuban Missile Crisis.
That said, Hitchcock also referenced a novel that became a 1959 movie called "On the Beach." Even BEFORE the Cuban Missile Crisis made things "real," that FICTIONAL movie put the idea into everybody's minds: "What if the superpower launched their nukes and killed everybody on the planet immediately ...leaving a thousand or so still alive in Australia to die slowly when the fallout reached them." The movie has a REAL doomsday feeling, as the survivors have dinner parties and romances and car races all the time knowing that they ALL (not just one person) have "a few months to live."
"On the Beach" was given simultaneous premieres in America and RUSSIA(showing that the Cold War could thaw) along with other international locales(London, Paris.)
So Hollywood was already trying to make a significant statement on world nuclear dangers as early as 1959. (On the Beach was a flop, BTW -- people didn't want to "enjoy" the thought of their mass death.) .
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I remember on some "acheivement award" TV special, Bruce had to stand on a stage with ultra-Democrat Julia Roberts and take it as she gave him a "nice" verbal smackdown for BEING a Republican. He nodded slowly and smiled.
Came the 90s and 2000s, these big movie stars started losing their box office power and started retreating a bit from their public Republicanism. Willis flat out said he was now an "Independent." I think Sly did too. Arnold stuck to being a registerered Republican and won the California governorship as one in...2002? But Arnold gave over a lot of his administration staffing to Democrats, under the guidance of the Kennedy family into which he had married via Maria Shriver.
By the way, in those "hot Reagan 80s" I distinctly recall new young star Kevin Costner supporting Republicans -- I think his father was one. But Kevin has dropped that over the years. In the past coupla years, we saw him backing REPUBLICAN Liz Cheney versus Trump, but I think his support now goes to Dems.
Anyway, with that political backdrop, we seem to have narrowed it down to two: Arnold for Harris, Sly for Trump. Not necessarily a matter of party affiliation at all. MAYBE part of a feud.
PS. Clint Eastwood has maintained a certain Republicanism since his Dirty Harry days. He then veered into Libertarianism with a strong enviromentalist bent -- but his public attack on Obama at one of the Republican conventions brought him back into the fold. He's too much the legend -- and now too old -- to get hurt.
what feud?
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I suppose that's a good question, because to the extent that there WAS a feud...it may have been manufacturered, and BY Arnold to BENEFIT Arnold...
For instance, early on in the comedy Twins(1988), Arnold's naive bumpkin character wanders down Hollywood Boulevard. He reaches a "Rambo" poster, compares his bare bicep to Sly's bicep on the poster-- and laughs at the poster in triumph.
But you have to figure that STALLONE had to CLEAR the use of the Rambo poster...so perhaps he was in on the joke.
After all, Sly and Arnold DID front "Planet Hollywood" together, along with fellow action man Bruce Willis.
That said, Arnold kind of based his career growth on giving lip to Sly in the press. I recall Arnold -- for real or not -- saying that Sly was wearing "disco-type" clothes that were too gaudy and fake -- and mink coats and things -- betraying his working man actor roots.
And higher up on this thread, I related that Arnold felt he somehow "tricked" Sly into making the poor comedy Stop or My Mom Will Shoot by faking his OWN interest in making the film. This is the kind of "fake out mental manipulation" that Arnold used against bodybuider competitors back in the day.
So...I dunno if there was a REAL feud between Arnold and Sly, or a SHOW feud..but it does seem a bit interesting that within weeks after Arnold(ostensibly a Republican) came out for Kamala Harris, Sly actually WENT ON STAGE at Trump's victory party. Somebody trying to upstage the other? A feud reignited.
I will also note here that back in the "President Reagan 80s", when Reagan beat Democrats Jimmy Carter(a sitting President) and Walter Mondale handily(wiping out Mondale), it felt 'safer" for some movie stars -- BIG ones -- to declare themselves Republicans. All three Planet Hollywood guys -- Sly, Arnold, and Bruce -- did.
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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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FIVE: A slighty silly commerical. No Hitchocck in it. Wide shot of the birds flying across that white screen but sudden cut to Tippi (against a white background herself) screaming. Then more birds.
THEN: Again with the black birds flying across the white background and the announcer practically yelling "Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds! In Color!"
Indeed EVERY SINGLE one of these commercials (whether with Hitchcock or with Tippi) ends by flashing to the truly rather SCARY sight and sound of those birds flying across the screen making noise as the announcer excitedly says "Alfred Hitchocck's The Birds! In color!"
(In the Psycho 1969 re-release commericals all run in a row on YouTube and DVD, you get the same announcer yelling "Alfred Hitchocck's PSYCHO!" exactly the same way, over and over again with each commericlal, as here with the birds. Taken together one can sense the one-two horror punch of Psycho and The Birds in the 60s.)
SIX: The TV commercial is taken from Hitchocck's theatrical trailer (the overlong one where he goes on and on about birds)..the GOOD part..where Tippi Hedren runs into the room and the film goes grainy and the camera zooms in for a close-up on her in very well acted terror "They're coming! They're COMING!" and THEN they cut to those birds and that announcer (Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds!)
..and I tell ya, suddenly l was seized not only with nostalgia, but some long gone MEMORIES came through. Some crystal clear, some not:
Crystal clear: I SAW the movie trailer at a theater with my parents and grandparents in 1963. A theater in Long Beach, California. I recall vaguely understanding that that man was Alfred Hitchcock and he had a TV show but I DEFINITELY remember the sudden chill when Tippi came running through the door yelling "They're COMING!" Was I scared? A little
, sure. But more I was excited and wanted to see that movie. And I got too, some weeks later.
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Clearly, this is cashing in on the fact that Psycho WAS the most terrifying movie he ever made and (said at least critic at the time) the most terrifying movie ANYONE ever made. But I think's Hitchcock's phrasing on "could" suggests that he KNEW that maybe The Birds was NOT the most terrifying movie he ever made. Psycho was.
FOUR: Hitchcock in the library again. No Tippi, no camera move to her.
Hitchcock: "(pointing at us) I want you to leave your homes right now and go to your local theater and see my new movie The Birds. (Then smiles) But make sure you are back here with me on Friday night.
A double whammy: the king of terror movies(thanks to Psycho) was STILL the king of TV mystery, too. I wonder if THIS commercial was only shown on CBS?
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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.