![]() ![]() Surprise is what really makes this thing work, so if you haven’t seen this 50-plus-year-old film, go watch it before reading the rest of this. My analysis of the film here may read a little like a plot synopsis-which is kind of inevitable for the kind of interpretation I’m laying out-and will obviously include some major spoilers. According to my reading of the film, The Birds actually starts as a romantic comedy, of all things, then switches gears into a full-on disaster movie before getting into classic Hitchcock territory as a home-invasion-horror flick and ending in post-apocalypse far before that genre was ever popularized. Sure, it’s a genre exercise-but what genre? What makes The Birds truly great is the way it exponentially raises the stakes by way of shapeshifting, starting as one film and defying expectations to become a different one multiple times over. Here, De Palma illustrates a common critical sentiment about The Birds, which is often dismissed as a cheap and shallow genre film that Hitchcock made in his sleep, more or less. ![]() De Palma says something along the lines of “some people try to make a case for The Birds, but…” then makes a half-shrug, half-eye-rolling motion. In the new documentary on Brian De Palma (we reviewed it here), the Hitchcock-obsessed director of Carrie and Blow Out dismisses The Birds as a lower-tier work, claiming that Hitchcock made his truly great films when he was in his 30s, 40s, and 50s. And while it may not be his absolute masterpiece (I’d give that title to Psycho ), I believe that Hitchcock manipulates his audience’s expectations to maximum effect in the sometimes-maligned The Birds, which demonstrates that the master of suspense was also the master of genre-hopping within a single film. This bit of quippy film criticism made Hitchcock one of the first directors who truly fascinated me, and I’ve found that description to be true of all of his films I’ve seen. According to the car radio, Hitchcock treated filmmaking like a musical art form, in which his job was to play the audience as if it were a pipe organ, pressing keys and and pushing buttons to manipulate their emotions to achieve a desired effect. ![]() The voice went through the obligatory motions of calling Hitch the “master of suspense” just as we call Elvis Presley the “king of rock and roll” or James Brown the “godfather of soul,” but it also described his filmmaking method in a way that has always stayed with me. I was very young-too young to have seen any of the director’s films-and sitting in the backseat of my parents’ car as a talk radio host described Hitchcock on what must have been an anniversary of his birth or death. My first exposure to Alfred Hitchcock was through radio. ![]()
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