User:Kfarr21/The Birds (film)

Hedren was awarded Most Promising Newcomer - Female at the 1964 Golden Globes for her role in the film.

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The Birds is a 1963 American natural horror-thriller film produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, released by Universal Pictures. Loosely based on the 1952 short story of the same name by Daphne du Maurier, it focuses on a series of sudden and unexplained violent bird attacks on the people of Bodega Bay, California, over the course of a few days.

The film stars Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren in her screen debut, alongside Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleshette, and Veronica Cartwright. The screenplay is by Evan Hunter, who was told by Hitchcock to develop new characters and a more elaborate plot while keeping du Maurier's title and concept of unexplained bird attacks.

At the 36th Academy Awards, Ub Iwerks was nominated for Best Special Effects for his work on the film. The award, however, went to the only other nominee, Emil Kosa Jr., for Cleopatra.

Hedren was awarded Most Promising Newcomer - Female at the 1964 Golden Globes for her role in the film.

The film was ranked 7th on the American Film Institute's "100 Most Thrilling Movies Ever."

In 2016, The Birds was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress, and selected for preservation in its National Film Registry.

Themes
Among the central themes explored in The Birds are those of love and violence. The representation of the birds in the film constantly changes to reflect the development of these themes, and the story itself. At first, the lovebirds in the pet store signify the blossoming love between Melanie and Mitch, and the sexual tension between the two. However, the birds' symbolism changes once they begin to attack Bodega Bay. Hitchcock stated in an interview that the birds in the film rise up against the humans to punish them for taking nature for granted.

Humanities scholar Camille Paglia wrote a monograph about the film for the BFI Film Classics series. She interprets it as an ode to the many facets of female sexuality and, by extension, nature itself. She notes that women play pivotal roles in it. Mitch is defined by his relationships with his mother, sister, and ex-lover—a careful balance that is disrupted by his attraction to the beautiful Melanie.

Style
Montage editing and slow pacing are used within the film to build suspense and elicit a greater emotional response from the audience during the attack scenes: "The pattern of The Birds was deliberately to go slow". This is exemplified in the scene where the birds gradually gather outside of the school, while an unobservant Melanie sits and waits on the bench. The camera then cuts between her and the increasing number of birds that swoop down onto the jungle gym behind her until they finally attack.

Eyeline matches and point-of-view (POV) shots within the film encourage audience identification with particular characters and their subjective experiences. This is achieved by cutting between the character and the object of their gaze. For example, when Melanie crosses the bay near the beginning of the film, the camera cuts between close-ups of her face and shots of the Brenner house from her perspective, as she watches Mitch fall for her prank.

The focus on editing and visuals rather than dialogue is also an element of pure cinema that Hitchcock largely uses throughout his work.

Hitchcock's behavior towards Hedren
More than fifty years after the film was released, it emerged in a series of interviews that Alfred Hitchcock may have behaved inappropiately towards Tippi Hedren during the filming of The Birds. Hedren said there were several incidents where she was subjected to sexual harassment from the famed director. Cast and crew described his behaviour on occasion as "obsessive" and Hedren claimed that "he suddenly grabbed me and put his hands on me. It was sexual". She stated that she rejected Hitchcock's advances on numerous occasions. Following the rejection, Hedren was injured during the filming of the phone booth attack scene consequently suffering cuts to her face from a pane of glass shattering on her. She said she was misled about the logistics of the final attack sequence because mechanical birds were replaced with real ones at the last minute.

There has been speculation that "Hitchcock's deliberate inflicting of injury was revenge for Hedren's spurning of his advances". Hitchcock also signed Hedren to a seven-year contract, which she stated restricted her ability to work. These allegations were not brought to light until after Hitchcock's death. Although they have never been confirmed, they have widely been reported, including by Hedren's co-star, Rod Taylor.

Hedren would later claim during a 2016 interview with Larry King that the sexual advances "didn't happen until we were almost finished with Marnie", that they had not started during The Birds, and that up until the end of Marnie Hitchcock had been "easy to work with", but in her memoir released around the same time, she repeated the earlier allegations, though clarified that the sexual assaults didn't begin until Marnie.

The controversy of this relationship is explored in the 2012 HBO/BBC film The Girl. Hedren's daughter Melanie Griffith claims that Hitchcock's abuse extended to her when he played a "prank" by gifting six-year-old Melanie with a wax figure of her mother in a miniature coffin.

Andrei Tarkovsky considered it a masterpiece and named it one of the 77 essential works of cinema.

Remake[edit]
A planned remake was announced in 2007, starring Naomi Watts and directed by Martin Campbell with a script by Stiles White and Juliet Snowden.

In 2017, the BBC announced it would be creating a mini-series for television that followed du Maurier's original novel. The series will be written by Conor McPherson and produced by David Heyman's Heyday Television.

Sequel[edit]
A poorly received television sequel, The Birds II: Land's End, was released in 1994. Director Rick Rosenthal removed his name from credit and used the Hollywood pseudonym Alan Smithee. The sequel featured entirely new characters and a different setting, with Bodega Bay only mentioned once. Tippi Hedren returned in a supporting role, but not as her original character.