Authors: Patrick McGilligan
Melanie is on the phone to her father in San Francisco, trying to describe the attacks. “I don’t know, Daddy,” she says in exasperation, “is there a difference between crows and blackbirds?”
“There is very definitely a difference, Miss,” interrupts Mrs. Bundy, standing nearby, who has overheard.
*
Mrs. Bundy lights a cigarette, then delivers an exegesis. She tosses off the Latin names of the species, while insisting that—in her opinion—neither crows nor blackbirds would boast “sufficient intelligence” to launch a massed attack, simply because their brain pans are not big enough.
“Ornithology happens to be my avocation,” Mrs. Bundy explains. “Birds are not aggressive creatures, Miss. They bring beauty to the world. It is mankind—”
“Sam! Three southern fried chicken. Baked potatoes on all of them!” a shouting waitress interjects in the background.
Melanie hangs up on her father, and dials Mitch.
“It is mankind rather,” Mrs. Bundy continues huffily, “who insists upon making it difficult for life to exist upon this planet. Now if it were not for birds—”
Over her shoulder Melanie says she doesn’t care what Mrs. Bundy says. Birds are attacking.
“Impossible!” scoffs Mrs. Bundy.
“It’s the end of the world!” cries the drunk at the end of the bar (the character, Hitchcock told Truffaut, who was “straight out of an O’Casey play”).
Still grappling to satisfy Hitchcock, Hunter included in his final draft a broadcast Mitch hears on the car radio toward the end of the film, as he prepares their escape. “It appears that the bird attacks come in waves with long intervals between. The reason for this does not seem clear yet.” Hunter had thus explained the attacks by pointing out that they were
inexplicable
, but in Hitchcock parlance, he had also hit the nail on the head—articulating the obvious.
Hunter suggested the final shots: birds swarming, scenes of wholesale destruction with victims lying everywhere, frightened faces peering out of windows. Melanie, Mitch, Lydia (Mitch’s mother), and Cathy (Mitch’s young sister) slip into their convertible and race down the road, just ahead of hundreds of birds. “Mitch?” asks Cathy, tears streaming down her face, as the car pulls slightly ahead, “will they be in San Francisco when we get there?” Then the script called for one last attack on the cloth-topped car as they race away.
One day, as Evan Hunter waited outside Hitchcock’s office for their daily meeting, the door popped open, and out Hitchcock darted to greet a woman standing down the hall, “in her favorite one or two poses from the movie,” in Hunter’s words. Coming back, the director matter-of-factly informed Hunter that the new arrival was their Melanie. Hunter stared.
“Who is she?”
Tippi Hedren.
“What is she?”
She had done hair commercials on television, he said.
“Do you think she has the range to play the comic scenes that we need at the beginning and then the terror at the end?”
“Trust me, Evan.”
Hunter had to trust him, and so did Lew Wasserman, but Hedren most of all had to put her faith in Hitchcock—and his confidence in her gave her confidence in herself.
Ever since the days of
The Lodger
and
Blackmail
, Hitchcock had been shaping films around favorite actresses and launching leading ladies. More recently, Vera Miles, in spite of disappointments, had served him well on television and in two feature films. With
The Trouble with Harry
, he had discovered a star in Shirley MacLaine, and in his three films with Grace Kelly he had sealed her image forever in the public mind. He had confidence in his star-making instincts.
Everything still began, for him, with the look of the performer—which had to be the look of the character in his mind. As he had done for nearly forty years, he started with Hedren by making her over. In the first months
of 1962 he convened a series of meetings to define Melanie’s hair, makeup, and wardrobe, followed by a parade of camera tests to judge the result. In consultation with Edith Head and Rita Riggs (for wardrobe), and Virginia Darcy and Howard Smit (hair and makeup), Hitchcock selected Melanie’s jewelry (a bracelet, ring, and single strand of baby pearls), her clothing (the mink coat and soft, cool green suit that Hitchcock thought hinted at a personal reticence), and her hairdo (swept back off her face).
The actress was subordinate to the look, and the look would inform the acting; Hitchcock would see to the rest. He said very little to Hedren
about
acting during
The Birds
, she recalled later, though he did suggest that Melanie might be compared to the character Tallulah Bankhead had played in
Lifeboat
—each “starting out as a jaded sophisticate and becoming more natural and humane in the course of her physical ordeal.”
“Melanie Daniels is
his
character,” she reflected later. Hitchcock “gives his actors very little leeway. He’ll listen, but he has a very definite plan in mind as to how he wants his characters to act. With me, it was understandable, because I was not an actress of stature.”
As part of her learner’s permit, Hedren was expected to attend many of the production meetings from which an actress might normally be excluded. During January and February Hitchcock met almost daily with his staff, and Hedren, silently sitting in, was made to feel like an integral part of the process. The actress said she “probably learned in three years what it would have taken me fifteen years to learn otherwise.”
Hitchcock counted on her learning, but he also counted on the expertise of his trusted cameraman Robert Burks, editor George Tomasini, and production designer Robert Boyle. The scenes involving hundreds of birds offered a unique technical challenge, and the unsung heroes of the film would include dozens of bird handlers and Universal scenic artists.
Among the key assistants to Robert Boyle were storyboard artist Harold Michaelson, who later became a top art director in his own right, and Albert Whitlock, a British-born matte painter who had sketched backgrounds for Hitchcock films in London back in the 1930s, before ending up at Universal in Hollywood. Michaelson created key storyboards based on Boyle’s scene and compositional sketches, while Whitlock’s atmospheric matte paintings would supply the aerial and establishing views of
The Birds.
After a series of failed experiments with mechanical birds, Hitchcock decided to use real birds as much as possible, superimposing them on film with the actors. Hitchcock’s crew undertook a frenzied campaign to round up birds of various species by contacting professional handlers. Trainer Ray Berwick, a former writer for TV’s
Lassie
and a trainer for
Birdman of Alcatraz
, supervised the care and training (when possible) of thousands of gulls, ravens, crows, sparrows, finches, and buntings. The real birds were used for foregrounds, and dummy birds and optical illusion for the mass scenes and distance shots.
Hitchcock now hired Ub Iwerks, a legendary animator and photographic expert associated with Walt Disney since the early 1920s, to oversee the optical printing for
The Birds
—using a sophisticated sodium vapor process Iwerks had devised. Iwerks, who had received a special Oscar in 1959 for his advancements in optical printing, would be the film’s “Special Photographic Advisor.”
Bernard Herrmann was still on call, but might have been disappointed to learn that his role would be circumscribed. Hitchcock had the radical idea of giving the film a sound track composed only of natural bird sounds, with no recognizable music. He wanted the birdcalls and noises performed on an advanced instrument he first encountered on Berlin radio in the late 1920s—the electroacoustic Trautonium, invented by one Dr. Friedrich Trautwein and developed further by Oskar Sala. Sala and Remi Gassmann, a Trautonium composer, lived in Germany, and they agreed to collaborate with Herrmann on a unique sound track mingling natural and electronic bird effects.
By late January, the square-jawed Australian Rod Taylor and New York stage-trained Suzanne Pleshette had been cast as Mitch and Annie. Hitchcock settled on Taylor as his reasonable Cary Grant substitute after watching
The Time Machine;
Pleshette had caught his eye in her first Universal films. (A personable underachiever, Pleshette would later find lasting success on television.)
Before there was even a script, Hitchock had zeroed in on Jessica Tandy to play Mitch’s overprotective mother. Born in London, Tandy had been admired in England for her classical acting, before her career took off in America; she had played a version of Blanche du Bois in the Los Angeles one-act forerunner of
A Streetcar Named Desire
—directed by her husband, Hitchcock’s longtime friend Hume Cronyn. Tandy made only infrequent screen appearances, but
The Birds
would benefit from her performance—icy and forbidding initially, though her character grows sympathetic as the film progresses.
An unknown lead actress. Thousands of real and animated birds. No music. At $3.3 million, his biggest budget yet. Hitchcock had often set extraordinary goals for himself: placing one film entirely within the confines of a small boat, making
Rope
entirely in uninterrupted sequential takes, taking a chance on 3-D and quality television, taking a stab at neorealism with
The Wrong Man
, pushing the envelope with a low-budget shocker like
Psycho.
But
The Birds
was his grandest experiment yet.
As the start date grew near, there was a palpable excitement among Hitchcock’s staff, but also an undercurrent of uncertainty and apprehension. Only Hitchcock was confident of his leading lady. No one could say whether all the birds and visual effects would merge credibly on-screen. Everyone understood that Hitchcock was reaching for something unusual, something daunting—something even he was groping to express.
“It was a little scary for all of us and probably for him,” production designer Boyle recalled. “The antagonists were birds, you know, it wasn’t a distant country that’s trying to do us in, it wasn’t a murderer or a rapist. It was something … strange. And it was hard to get hold of.”
Hitchcock kept telling the staff they weren’t making a science fiction film. So one day matte artist Whitlock, feeling “a bit shaky” about the project, asked the director, “Well, what are we making, Hitch?” “And he didn’t know,” Whitlock recalled.
In later interviews Hitchcock, maintained that he never lost sleep over the daunting special effects required for
The Birds.
“Never dared face them [the special effects challenges] at the outset,” the director said later. “Otherwise the film never would have been made. I played it by ear.”
What continued to worry him was the script—and how to conclude the story.
Assessing the various drafts, film scholar Bill Krohn reached a conclusion that speaks to the whole course of Hitchcock’s career. After Evan Hunter finished his version, according to Krohn,
The Birds
was plunged into an elaborate production process, which resulted in a flurry of pink-sheet additions, modifications, and—most extraordinarily—a significant amount of last-minute improvisation by Hitchcock on the set. The changes occurred not only in the dialogue but, in scene after scene, in visual ideas that increasingly focused Melanie’s subjective viewpoint. By the end, the basic draft was altered so substantially that it had evolved into what amounted to an informal final draft—for which only one man could claim true authorship.
After Hunter finished and moved on, Hitchcock continued to hone the script, a process that was perfectly natural to him. He solicited input from his staff and other writers, among them Hume Cronyn, whose wife now had a role in the film. Cronyn wrote the director, suggesting that there was “still room for improvement in the development and relationship of the principal characters. The implied arrogance, silliness, and selfishness of the early Melanie may need heightening, so that the change to consideration, responsibility, and maturity are more marked—and more enduring.”
Another old acquaintance Hitchcock consulted was V. S. Pritchett—a struggling writer when they first knew each other in England, now a distinguished man of letters, teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. Pritchett came to discuss the story over dinner several times, in both Bel Air and Santa Cruz, and during filming Hitchcock had him ceremoniously chauffeured to the set. A fan of Pritchett’s short fiction, Hitchcock liked to tease the author that what his acclaimed story “The Wheelbarrow” really needed was a murder (“which left me aghast,” admitted Pritchett). If Pritchett added a murder, Hitchcock said, he might even film it.
In private letters to his family, Pritchett noted that Hitchcock reminded him of “a ripe Victoria plum endowed with the gift of speech,” but the celebrated author was flattered to be courted by the director. “My father always spoke of Hitchcock with enormous fondness,” recalled his son Oliver Pritchett. Quietly, Hitchcock employed the author to write a “destructive criticism” (in Pritchett’s words) of Hunter’s script for
The Birds;
as Pritchett later reported to his son, “I did so and he [Hitchcock] seems to think it’s useful.”
As usual, however, Hitchcock took only what resonated with his instincts. For example, Pritchett praised the scene where President Kennedy’s State of the Union address is overheard on the radio as Mitch is boarding up the Brenner house for the climactic bird attack. In the speech, Kennedy extols America’s role as “the great defender of freedom in its hour of maximum danger.” Although Pritchett appreciated the Cold War irony of this passage, Hitchcock eliminated it during final editing.
Pritchett expressed concern that the “two different stories—in this case a light comedy and a terror tale” might not “weld together,” but the author’s suggestion to “link the two stories more closely” by turning Melanie into “someone who causes disasters because of her ‘wildness,’ having even killed someone inadvertently with one of her practical jokes,” was rejected. In fact, it was pointedly countered in Hunter’s favorite scene—when the hysterical mother advances on Melanie at the restaurant: “They say that when you came here, this started. I think you’re the cause of this. I think you’re evil. Evil!”