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 Product Description
In THE BIRDS, Alfred Hitchcock's heart-pounding follow-up to PSYCHO, the director couples a tone of rigorous morality with dark humor to create a thriller that begins as a light comedy and ends as an apocalyptic allegory. Tippi Hedren (Melanie Griffith's mother) carries the picture in her first film role ever, embarking on a career as an icy-cool leading lady. Loosely based on a Daphne du Maurier story and a Santa Monica newspaper account, "Seabird Invasion Hits Coastal Homes," THE BIRDS also features groundbreaking special effects that, in 1963, surprised and delighted audiences.
Wealthy reformed party girl Melanie Daniels (Hedren) enjoys a brief flirtation with lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) in a San Francisco pet shop and decides to follow him to his Bodega Bay home. ...See Full Description
Customer Reviews
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| If your into Alfred Hitchcock
I have always liked this movie so thats why I got it.
By raquel_e_fiallos (sacramento ca) 
This review is for a different format. |
| Sexy triller
Suspenseful and thought-provoking, with the expected sexual tension between an icy, alluring blonde leading lady and a handsome, leading man; what we expect from Mr. Hitchcock.
By a reviewer (Saint Louis, MO)
This review is for a different format. |
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| Another Classic Hitch film
This is another one of Hitch's classic films which made him even more noticed after his peak in Psycho. One of Norman Bates lines in Psycho was birds are harmless. This is not the case in this film. Hitch once said that this was perhaps his hardest and most suspensfull movie he's made. I have to agree witht his. Although this movie didn't do as well as Psycho, it still made alot of money and is considered to be one of HItch's greatest films. The amount of work needed to make this film must have been so hard for Hitch to gather. It involved blue and yellow screens, aswell as special cameras and tricks. Well if one man can pull off a pack of birds attacking humans in a film which was made in 1963, Hitch was the man to do it.
By Janet (Toronto, Canada)
This review is for a different format. |
| What species are they??
This classic Hitchcock film is horrifying and creepy! The special affects are amazing to be a "Classic!" What species are these "Birds?" I'm more terrified of all birds now more than ever!!
By Mary Jane (Lebanon, KY--)
This review is for a different format. |
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| Norman Bates warned us all!
One of the most striking features in "Psycho" is the recurrent bird imagery. Norman has stuffed birds hung up in his room, whose cruel eyes seem to follow his every move. In his very moving conversation with Marion, he says: "You know what I think? I think that we're all in our private traps . . . and none of us can ever get out. We scratch and claw, but only at the air, only at each other." It is almost as if Hitchcock were subconsciously preparing for his next film, "The Birds", in which, towards the end, the delirious heroine does literally try to scratch and claw at the air. Also, the characters have to erect their own cage to protect themselves from attack by birds, which have inexplicably declared war on the human race. "I have a phrase to myself," said Hitchcock, "I always say that logic is dull." "The Birds" is not an illogical film. It is an anti-logic film, in which the attempt to explain away the bird attacks by people like the sheriff in the Brenner home and the ornithologist in the café delays the process of acting responsibly and even costs lives. The narrative is full of enigmas. Why do the birds attack? What is the significance of the lovebirds, which Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) has brought as a present for the kid sister of Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor)? Is there a casual relationship between Melanie's arrival in Bodega Bay and the horror of what follows? By raising and refusing to answer these questions, Hitchcock ensures that the complacency of these characters has been completely undermined, which is one of the main themes of the film. "The Birds" is Hitchcock's most technically innovative film. The electrical effects on the soundtrack are superbly orchestrated, and the four hundred trick shots involving the birds move Hitchcock's cinema into the realm of special effects. (When asked by a lady journalist how he had managed to make birds act so well, Hitchcock replied, politely: "They were very well paid, ma'am.") In a way, "The Birds" is Hitchcock's closest film to Disney, a violent cartoon by which the fantasy creatures attack "real" people. It is also Hitchcock's most apocalyptic film, with an underlying exhortation to "Mend your ways, the end of the world may be nigh..." Unlike the opening forty minutes of "Psycho", which screws the film's tension to its highest point, the opening of "The Birds" has sometimes been criticized for being slow and languid. But the opening encounter in the bird shop between Melanie and Mitch, whose surface antagonism conceals immediate attraction, is full of little ironies. The basic situation is one that the film will later reverse, to show the humans in their gilded cages and the birds on the outside looking in. What follows is equally important. Melanie follows Mitch to Bodega Bay with a present of lovebirds which is really a sort of practical joke. She encounters Mitch's former girlfriend, Annie (Suzanne Pleshette), and his mother (Jessica Tandy) whose edgy exchanges with Melanie imply a hostility that their civilized exterior hypocritically suppresses. Mitch and Melanie seem trapped in a game of surface and satirical sparring. The birds serve as an externalization if this inner tension. A story of lovebirds becomes a story of hate-birds, and what starts out as a peck on Melanie's head develops into a wholesale assault on her world. It is almost as if the birds come out of the sky in anger at human behavior, ripping apart the evasions, deceptions and snobbishness of these people and forcing them to discover a new sincerity and courage. A sequence in which Mitch and the sheriff argue about an invasion by sparrows of the Brenner home his visually dominated by the behavior of Mitch's mother, Mrs. Brenner. Her slow clearing up of the broken china seems both an attempt to piece normality together and an indication of her own fragility in the face of the coming horror. The motif of china is continued in a following scene when Mrs. Brenner visits a nearby farm and, prior to discovering the farmer's dead body, has a shiver of premonition on catching sight of a row of smashed cups hanging by their handles. When Melanie later brings her some tea, the shocked Mrs. Brenner begins at last to open up and Melanie offers to collect Cathy, Mitch's young sister, from school. Another classic scene follows. As Melanie waits for Cathy outside the school, the birds mass behind her in preparation for an attack on the children, turning the playground into a territory of terror. The sly way Hitchcock builds the scene, by showing one bird, and then four, then concealing his full hand until Melanie turns, surrounded, is suspense film crafted of the highest class. Interestingly, the characters behave similarly when the birds attack the home at the end and when we only hear and do not see them. (By this time, Hitchcock can convey terror though sound alone.) Their gestures again recall the words of Norman Bates about human beings "caught in private traps" and "clawing at the air and each other." [filmfactsman]
By filmfactsman (Beverly Hills, CA, USA)
This review is for a different format. |
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Product Details
| Studio | Universal Studios Home Video |
| Orig Year | 1963 |
| DVD Encoding | Region 1 |
| CD Universe Part number | 8772883 |
| Catalog number | 61122846 |
| Discs | 1 |
| Release Date | Aug 28, 2012 |
| Rating | PG-13 (MPAA) |
| Running Time | 120 Minutes |
| Additional Info | Widescreen; With Digital Copy |
| Movie Details | Color; Widescreen; With Digital Copy; Universal 100th Anniversary; Includes Digital Copy |
DVD Features
DVD Features:
Region 1
Note: Deleted scene
The original ending
Tippi Hedren's screen test
The Birds is coming (Universal International newsreel)
Suspense story: national press club hears Hitchcock (Universal International newsreel)
Dual Layer
Widescreen - 1.85
Audio:
Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono - English, French
Subtitles - English
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