Authors: Patrick McGilligan
Whereupon Melanie slaps the hysterical mother, once and for all eliminating from
The Birds
any hint of “Melanie-as-jinx,” in Bill Krohn’s phrase.
Pritchett’s most important influence, though, may have been in calling for an ending different from Hunter’s. Pritchett deserved “the credit (or blame) for urging that the film end on a gloomier note, with the people in the car looking backwards at the village with fear, rather than forward to the hope of escape,” thought Hunter. Hunter resented this as well as the other script changes made after his departure—whether by a celebrated author or persons anonymous. “Hitch allowed his actors outrageous liberties with what I had written,” Hunter complained in one interview; “he juggled scenes and cut scenes and even added one scene.”
The wholesale addition was inserted during the children’s blindman’s buff birthday party. In a brief interlude, Mitch and Melanie wander up the sand dunes carrying a martini pitcher and two glasses. They pour drinks for themselves, and Melanie opens up to Mitch, revealing that she has never known a mother’s love; her own mother, she explains, abandoned her at the age of eleven to run off “with some hotel man in the east.”
Hunter didn’t learn about this vignette until it was about to be filmed,
and when he did he was infuriated, excoriating it as a “pointless piece of exposition.” Not realizing that the scene was a kind of suite of Hitchcock tropes—blindman’s buff, martinis, a rotten mother, an absentee father—he suspected that the ideas must have originated with Pritchett. Wondering who could have written such “inane dialogue,” he complained vociferously, but Hitchcock shot the new pages anyway.
Only later did Hunter learn that “Hitchcock himself had written it.” Besides the tropes, the scene exhibited the kind of depth of characterization and literary symmetry that Hitchcock always strove for in a script; it gave Melanie, whose father dotes on her, a heartless mother—in contrast with Mitch, whose father recently has died, and whose mother is clinging. Not insignificantly, the new dialogue also gave Melanie a rare sympathetic moment in the film.
Years later, reflecting on his collaboration with Hitchcock, Hunter promoted a version of events that emphasized the director’s desperate need to be recognized for his artistry. Hunter recalled Hitchcock boasting that “he was entering the Golden Age of his creativity. He told me
The Birds
would be his crowning achievement.” Hunter’s very hiring lent “respectability” to that aim, the writer believed, because he was the author of
The Blackboard Jungle
—which, Hitchcock must have noticed, “had received serious critical appraisal.”
*
Hitchcock tried in interviews “to justify”
The Birds
“as a great work of art,” Hunter insisted, claiming that “the Girl” represented “complacency” and that “people like Melanie Daniels tend to behave without any kind of responsibility, and to ignore the more serious aspects of life. Such people are unaware of the catastrophe that surrounds us all.
The Birds
basically symbolized the more serious aspects of life.” Such claims should be regarded as so much rot—a showman’s con, according to Hunter. “I think Hitch is putting on the world when he pretends there is anything meaningful about
The Birds,”
the writer countered in his own interviews. “We were trying to scare the hell out of people. Period.”
After their relationship collapsed with
Marnie
, Hunter gave many interviews and then wrote a book in which he criticized the final form of
The Birds
, blaming Hitchcock for its supposed gaping faults. The writer admitted being offended by Hitchcock’s equivocal comments—recycled in
Me and Hitch
—that Hunter may not have been “the ideal screenwriter [for
The Birds
]. You look around, you pick a writer, hoping for the best.” He joined the faction of Hitchcock collaborators who couldn’t accept the
director’s ultimate power over their work, becoming one of its loudest, most persistent voices.
As a follow-up to
Psycho
, as his most expensive film ever, and as Hitchcock’s first film for Universal,
The Birds
had to succeed wildly to succeed at all.
When filming began in the Bay Area on March 5, Hitchcock found himself “pouring myself into ‘the Girl,’ ” as he later told François Truffaut—and careening about in an unaccustomed “state of distress.” He paged through the script at night after work, finding “deficiencies” at every turn. “This emotional siege that I had,” he said later, “seemed to spark an extra creative thing in me.”
At times, he said, he almost felt “lost.” Time and again Hitchcock second-guessed his meticulous planning and went “off on a tangent,” in production designer Robert Boyle’s words.
For the film to succeed wildly, Tippi Hedren also had to succeed wildly. In later interviews, the director boasted with apparent arrogance that he had mapped out her “every expression—never a wasted one.” But Rod Taylor, Suzanne Pleshette, and Jessica Tandy were seasoned players who could fend for themselves; Hedren, on the other hand, needed to be molded. She has never denied that he walked her through every expression.
As often happened, Hitchcock’s technical achievements overshadowed his actors’ performances—and Hedren’s debut comes off as a remarkable triumph. In some scenes, she was surprisingly deft; in others, her acting was a master filmmaker’s illusion. The scenes that really stick with people—those where Melanie suffers bird attacks, or fights them off—are pure cinema, pure Hitchcockery.
For example, the first gull that swoops down on Melanie as her boat docks at Bodega Bay. The boat docking was shot in the studio, against a blue screen over which a rear projection plate was later printed. For the long shots a gull was trained to land on Hedren’s head, but for the close-ups the crew had planted a dummy seagull up in the rafters, attached to a wire on a pulley—and when the dummy gull was released it zoomed toward the actress. A pump hidden in her dress riffled her hair, and a trickle of blood was released by similar means.
Live birds were deployed for many scenes, however, and the winged creatures could be ruthless. The actors often had anchovies or ground meat smeared on their hands to attract the birds, and everyone suffered bites and scratches. According to trainer Ray Berwick, on the worst days a dozen crew members were sent to the hospital.
Hedren definitely had the worst of it, and the worst of the worst was the memorable sequence, in which the birds pour down the Brenner house
chimney and assault Melanie and the Brenner family. This was filmed at Universal in the first week of April, after cast and crew had returned from three weeks of location work around San Francisco and Bodega Bay. The location footage had revolved almost entirely around the actors; the birds shot on location were all trained, and then the swarms that appear onscreen were superimposed later by Ub Iwerks and his staff.
The live birds were trickiest on the soundstages, and the crescendo attack on the Brenner house, with birds funneling down the chimney, called for the largest number. The bird noises and sounds of fluttering wings would be amplified later, but on the set, as in silent film days, Hitchcock had a drummer and microphone making “a loud drum roll to help [the actors] react.”
The living-room set had to be enclosed by a plastic wall so the birds couldn’t escape. Opaque cages held hundreds of finches, sparrows, and other birds atop the prop chimney. “On cue,” Kyle B. Counts reported in his definitive chronicle of the production, “trap doors were opened in the cages and, spotting the light below, the birds flew down the chimney. Air hoses handled by grips kept them from roosting.”
*
After surviving their ordeal, the exhausted Brenner family falls asleep. Melanie thinks she hears a peeping noise and heads upstairs, opening doors and looking for birds. Ambushed in the attic by a dive-bombing mass of birds, she stumbles against the door, trapping herself inside. The winged creatures envelop her fiercely, clawing and biting her.
Hedren had assumed that the bulk of the birds in this scene would be mechanical or optical creations, but Hitchcock decided at the last minute that the terror had to be real—for Melanie and the audience. It was one of the last scenes on the schedule, and the actress wasn’t warned that she would be facing live gulls until the very morning of shooting.
Another special set had been built for the scene, surrounded by a huge cage to keep the birds from soaring into the rafters. Inside the cage were a crew of propmen, wearing thick leather gloves up to their elbows to protect themselves. Although the gulls were trained, they quickly learned to avoid Hedren, and had to be hurled at her by the propmen. Air jets kept the birds from flying into the camera lens. This extraordinary scene, which occupies roughly one minute of screen time, took an entire week to shoot, and it became a grueling physical ordeal for all involved—but especially for the leading lady.
Midweek during the filming of this scene Cary Grant visited the set, taking a break from Universal’s
That Touch of Mink.
After watching a few
takes, Grant told Hedren, “You’re one brave lady.” (The actress mused later: “I then considered the possibility that maybe this was one of the reasons why Hitchcock had chosen an unknown for the part.”)
She had to be brave, for things were getting worse. “By Thursday,” Hedren remembered, “I was noticeably nervous. By Friday they had me down on the floor with the birds tied loosely to me with elastic bands which were attached through the peck-hole in my dress. Well, one of the birds clawed my eye and that did it. I just sat and cried.”
To be fair, even Hedren has said this week appeared to be an ordeal for Hitchcock, too. He sat in his office and wouldn’t come out “until we were absolutely ready to shoot,” according to Hedren; the very prospect of the scene was sobering, and the actual filming nightmarish.
And in the film the attic scene is followed by a sensitive moment. After rescuing her from the birds, Mitch brings Melanie downstairs and lays her on the couch. When she wakes up she recoils reflexively, hysterically batting away invisible birds until she is forced down and comforted by Mitch. Hitchcock said in interviews that this detail was inspired by his personal memories of feeling alone at Claridge’s in London during World War II—hearing bombs fall, and shouts and noises, and not knowing what to do.
Following the final attack of the birds, the Brenners escape the house—a key scene with the principals that remained to be shot. Hitchcock was still pondering the film’s ending. Should the birds keep up their attack? Why were the birds attacking? Why? The moron millions would want some answer, and he hated tidy answers.
It was during the last days of principal photography that Hitchcock decided to scrap Evan Hunter’s ending, and excise several pages of dialogue and storyboarded visuals in favor of a single lengthy shot that would show Melanie and the Brenners slowly driving away in their sports car, crossing a bird-infested landscape as dawn breaks overhead. No final pursuit by the birds; no implication the attacks have spread—or have ended.
The future was left ambiguous. To Hunter Hitchcock’s ending was a betrayal, yet its message was faithful to du Maurier’s novella. More important, it was true to Hitchcock—the kind of open ending the director had always preferred, salvaging his characters without offering any false reassurance that evil had been entirely vanquished.
“Emotionally speaking,” Hitchcock later said in defense of the controversial ending, “the movie was already over for the audience. The additional scenes would have been playing while everyone was leaving their seats and walking up the aisles.”
The ending was also a technical accomplishment, weaving the actors together seamlessly with a horde of live, dummy, and optical-illusion birds, against a background which is one of Albert Whitlock’s finest matte paintings. Thirty-two different exposures were required for the film’s final
image, which remains stunning—“the most difficult single shot I’ve ever done,” said Hitchcock.
The special-effects sequences, focusing primarily on Tippi Hedren, continued long after the rest of the cast had gone home. These included the scene with Melanie trapped in a telephone booth, assaulted by gulls—almost entirely a blue process shot blended with real and optical birds. The scoring, final optical effects, and other postproduction polishing on
The Birds
would occupy Hitchcock at least until midsummer, after which he had resolved to push ahead with
Marnie.
Although Hitchcock and Evan Hunter had kidded themselves by calling “the Girl” Grace during their early work on
The Birds
, Hitchcock’s next project thoroughly depended on the Princess of Monaco’s repeated assurances that she would play the lead. From their very first discussions about
Marnie
, Hitchcock had referred to the character of Marnie as “HSH”—Her Serene Highness.
But Hitchcock made the mistake of announcing Grace Kelly’s comeback prematurely, just as
The Birds
got under way on location. According to a March 18 press statement,
Marnie
was expected to begin filming in August on the East Coast, with Kelly in the title role.
In fact, Hitchcock had arranged the schedule to coincide with the royal family’s annual summer visit to Philadelphia. Although for years Prince Rainier had opposed his wife’s return to acting, now he was widely quoted as saying he would keep the princess company during filming. Prompted “both by concern for his wife’s mental health and by his affection and respect for Alfred Hitchcock,” according to one Grace Kelly biographer, Rainier approved of
Marnie
and, sensing his wife’s equivocation, “kind of pushed her” into the project.
Yet the idea appears to have caught the populace of Monaco by surprise, and the news was met with a national outcry. For someone often described as a peerless manipulator of the press, Hitchcock made his share of blunders over the years, and he contributed to the brouhaha by giving an exclusive interview to London journalist Peter Evans of the
Daily Express
during the filming of
The Birds
, in which he celebrated Kelly’s sex appeal as the “finest in the world.” In a flood of letters and petitions, the citizens of Monaco protested the prospect of seeing their princess in Hollywood love scenes—not to mention the forcible variety called for in
Marnie.