The Birds (1963) on Netflix
Melanie Daniels, a San Francisco socialite, brings lovebirds to Bodega Bay for the sister of lawyer Mitch Brenner, who recognized her from a courtroom. A gull wounds her at the wharf.
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Trailer
Plot summary
In a San Francisco pet store, lawyer Mitch Brenner shops for lovebirds for his sister Cathy's eleventh birthday and quizzes Melanie Daniels, a socialite he knows from a court appearance over a practical joke. She fails his questions. Curious, she acquires the birds herself and sets out for Bodega Bay, where Mitch is staying at his family's farm. The teacher Annie Hayworth, Mitch's former lover, supplies Cathy's name. Melanie crosses the bay by boat and leaves the birds at the Brenner farm. At the wharf a gull wounds her; Mitch tends the cut and asks her to dinner. At the farm his mother Lydia takes against her, and a dead gull appears on Annie's doorstep.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Birds (1963)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- More than fifty years after the film's release, interviews revealed that Alfred Hitchcock may have behaved inappropriately toward Tippi Hedren during filming; Hedren said there were several incidents in which she was sexually harassed by the famed director.
- Tippi Hedren said she rejected Alfred Hitchcock's advances on numerous occasions, and was then injured filming the phone booth attack scene, suffering cuts to her face from a pane of glass shattering on her; she said she was misled because mechanical birds were replaced with real ones at the last minute.
- The Birds was partly inspired by a real mass bird attack on Capitola, California, on August 18, 1961, when seabirds dive-bombed homes and dropped half-digested anchovies on lawns; Hitchcock heard of it and used it as research while the film was in progress, and the real cause, toxic algae, was not known in the 1960s.
- Most of the birds seen in the film are real, but an estimated more than $200,000 was spent creating mechanical birds for it, and Ray Berwick was in charge of the live birds, training and catching many of them himself.
- Hitchcock cut the last 10 pages of the screenplay, and possibly more, to make the ending more ambiguous; he wanted the film to end without a "The End" card, but was forced to include one before the film's full release.
- Special effects shots of the attacking birds were completed at Walt Disney Studios by animator and technician Ub Iwerks, who used the sodium vapor process ("yellow screen") that he had helped develop; it gave more precise matte shots than blue screen, needed because the birds' rapid wing flapping caused fringing.
- Alfred Hitchcock decided the film would have no conventional incidental score, using sound effects and sparse source music against calculated silences, and wanted the electroacoustic Mixtur-Trautonium to create the bird calls and noises.
- The film featured 370 effects shots, and its final shot was a composite of 32 separate elements, after Universal Pictures' associate editor Ross Hoffman and matte artist Albert Whitlock designed the town's backdrop and the river shots of Melanie's car arriving in Bodega Bay.
