I don't like magpies.
Australian magpies, I should say, which are different from what's called a magpie in other parts of the world.
These black-and-white birds are the most territorial I have ever encountered. Now granted, in my late teens and early 20s I worked on an island where if you went out on the rocks and approached a seagull nest, they would attack you. We carried sticks with us, not to use to hit the birds, but so they would attack the top of the stick when you held it up, rather than your head.
I assume the same is true of magpies, or might be anyway. The problem is, their territory is the same as yours. You don't have to walk way out on the rocks to get to their nests. They build their nests in any old tree that they fancy, right in your neighborhood, and when it's nesting season, they swoop. Unless you want to carry a stick with you at all times you walk outdoors -- a strange look to be sure -- you are in constant danger of being swooped in the Australian springtime. Which is now.
I have not actually had a traumatic swooping experience, though about a month ago, a magpie flew very close to my son and me as we were walking to school. I think it was intended as a swoop, but the bird didn't touch us. Around the same time, though, my wife was swooped closely enough that she felt the bird's wing against her neck.
There was a swooping incident in the Sydney area some ten years ago where a mother carrying her infant was swooped and lost her balance. The baby suffered a traumatic injury in the fall and ultimately died. If I remember correctly, a Japanese tourist himself died from a perfectly located peck that perforated some part of his brain through his ear canal. Would have been one in a million, but it did happen.
So, magpies are no joke. When I'm walking past one, I keep a wide berth and I eyeball it like David Duke walking through Harlem.
I even saw one weird situation recently where one magpie was walking along the bike path on the ground, and another one was flying in a tight circular pattern above it, changing altitudes from about waist height to head height if measured on a human. It was like they were some two-pronged attack machine -- even if this maneuver was primarily devised for defensive purposes.
So I thought this was a good Halloween season to finally rewatch Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.
Ranked #777 on my Flickchart (out of 6395 films), The Birds makes easily the lowest ranked "favorite" I've rewatched for Audient Classics, and therefore, the least qualifying for the definition of "classic." There were probably higher ranked pre-1973 horror movies I could have watched if I wanted a horror movie for October, and certainly higher ranked Hitchcock movies I've seen only once. (Rope, I'm looking at you.)
But keeping in mind the long preamble of this post, The Birds seemed like the right movie.
If you wanted, you could call it a horror comedy, keeping with the theme I'm pursuing this month in my other horror viewings. By today's standards, there is something funny about the snapping beaks of fake birds as the film's human characters fight them off. Sixty years ago, Hitchcock didn't have the more sophisticated effects we have today. (Thank God for that, I'd argue.)
Watching the film, though, you are not inclined to laugh. It's sinister as hell. We don't know why these birds are attacking, which makes them different from a magpie protecting a nest. They just decided they were fed up with millennia of micro- and macro-aggressions from humans and now, enough was enough.
A thing I really noticed on this viewing, which I'm sure is one of the regular talking points about The Birds, is that there is no conventional musical score, Bernard Hermann or otherwise. The only soundtrack is the menacing screeching of the birds, when they are attacking. Otherwise the only sounds are silence and dialogue.
What I found fascinating and unnerving -- another talking point I'm sure -- is why the birds sometimes attack, and sometimes don't. The movie's most famous scenes are undoubtedly not the attack scenes, but the ones where characters move slowly through an avian field perched on various fence posts and jungle gyms, as though waiting for a signal to attack, but not actually attacking. When a character gets close enough, a bird offers some mild pecks, kind of like a puppy's first attempts to nip someone's finger. But they know they do not have -- permission, would it be? -- to really go at this human. Not at this exact moment, anyway.
The thing that makes it a great horror, rather than just the genre of suspense that gets applied to the majority of Hitchcock's films, is the bodies left in the birds' wake. The first we see is a man whose eyes have been pecked out, lying in the corner of a room in his house, which he certainly would have thought was a safe haven. Then there's the character played by Suzanne Plechette -- who I initially mistook for Shirley MacLaine -- lying at the foot of her front steps, one of her own feet cocked up at an angle as it rests on a step. We don't really get to see her face -- a little bit of mercy from Hitchcock on that one -- and we only learn what happened to her because young Cathy explains it to Teppi Hedren's and Rod Taylor's characters after they extract her from the situation. Could Hitchcock have showed us the birds swarming on Plechette's Annie Hayworth -- covering her, as Cathy says? Maybe, but maybe he knew he couldn't get the effect right to convey the horror. Better leave it to our imagination.
One effect he does get right, I think, is the relentless close-range pecking of the birds in other situations, as they open new wounds and steadily exhaust the stamina of the victim. It's chaotic and unrelenting and you really feel the anxiety Hitchcock is going for. If you went into this film thinking someone couldn't be pecked to death, you emerge feeling quite the opposite.
Because it is a Hitchcock film, I found myself looking for the mise-en-scene techniques Hitchcock was famous for, ways of arranging elements in the shot that we always studied in film class. I don't think The Birds is really that sort of film, and that could be why it isn't among the director's most revered. Again this is something that would have been written about, but without reading anything about it myself, I'm concluding that Psycho was such a radical film that prompted so many varying reactions that he just wanted to make a more contained genre picture with his next film -- even though this does get into some of that movie's same themes about mothers and sons. (Jessica Tandy plays Taylor's mother, something I might not have noticed or at least remembered from my first viewing.)
I do think, however, that there was a little more carryover from Psycho. With the editing of the birds attacking at close range, I couldn't help but think of the knife strokes that end Janet Leigh in that film's infamous shower scene.
Other random observations:
1) The girl Cathy is played by Veronica Cartwright, who went on to a long career, including the woman who screams so horribly when she sees the alien burst out of John Hurt's chest in Alien.
2) I continue to be surprised that this is from a novel by Daphne Du Maurier. I think of her as a writer of latter day Elizabethan novels, as her books Rebecca, Jamaica Inn (which I've read) and My Cousin Rachel all are of that ilk (and all adapted into films, in some cases multiple films). That she would write a horror novel about attacking birds has always struck me as a disconnect, and continues to do so.
3) And while it was indeed based on Du Maurier's novel, I learned just now that part of the inspiration came from a real-life event Hitchcock heard about in a seaside town in California, in 1961, when the film was already in development. Sea birds dive-bombed the town as a result of what is now known to have been toxic algae, though the cause was a mystery at the time.
Okay, only two more months in this series ... time to clamp down and really figure out which, among my dozens of remaining choices, are most demanding of my attention.
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