The Birds: 60 Years later, a Movie for our Time

The soundtrack to Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 film The Birds is the soundtrack of our lives. We all hear it every day, played in the trees -- chirping, chattering and cackling. The natural world thanking God for His bounty? After streaming the film, I hear the raucous war council of alien creatures.

The Birds does what the best films do, change the way I see ordinary life. Since I last saw it on black-and-white TV five decades ago, I've had flashbacks to the film whenever crows looked up from their carrion to me, or when, perched on a street lamp, they glowered down at me and my little dog. I expected the film to have lost its potency, its effects and dialogue sure to be dated. Instead, this week it chilled me more than ever. This is a movie for our time.

Screenwriter Evan Hunter (a.k.a. detective novelist Ed McBain) agreed with Hitchcock to begin the film as a romantic comedy. Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) and Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) "meet cute" at a pet store in San Francisco. He mistakes her for the clerk and she plays the part, although she can't begin to find the birds he wants for his little sister's birthday. When she realizes that he was playing her, she determines to get even. Bearing the gift of two lovebirds, she traces him to the coastal village Bodega Bay in her sporty convertible, sporting a long fur coat and high heels even when she rents a row boat. She's like Eva Gabor in the sitcom Green Acres, a classic fish-out-of-water.

For suspense, Hitchcock teases us with signs of what's to come. He starts with the eerie aural collage of bird calls that plays while silhouettes of birds in flight criss-cross behind the titles. A funnel cloud of gulls circling over San Francisco briefly draws Melanie's attention. When she's in the rowboat, a swooping gull nicks her forehead. But the characters are more concerned with their own lives.

As in all rom-coms, there's a rapprochement between Mitch and Melanie. The spoiled heiress tells sympathetic Mitch that she wants to live a life that matters.

She gets her chance in the very next moment. They're holding hands on a green hill above the little sister's birthday party, literally the high point of the movie -- when the birds attack. Children are screaming, birds are popping balloons, and Melanie joins Mitch in rescuing little kids knocked down by birds that peck and claw at their faces.

From then on, the story is how to find shelter, how to prepare for another attack, how to help each other through this emergency.

That's how I experienced the pandemic in March 2020. We'd heard news stories about outbreaks in distant territories. We discussed contingencies such as a couple of days off from school. Suddenly, it was lockdown, and all our plans from The Before Time were unworkable, canceled, never to return.

The recurring question in The Birds is, "Why?" A drunk quotes scripture to say it's God's punishment for our sins. A woman screams at Melanie, "You brought this on! Everything was normal until you came here!" An ornithologist (Ethel Griffies) says it's mankind who have made the world so inhospitable to nature.

Today, we're aware how our lights at night disorient millions of birds on their nocturnal migrations. Our mirrored skyscrapers are death traps. We've "developed" their habitats. Man-made climate change has shifted seasons so that migrating birds cannot find the insects and seeds they need, and shifts in territory have given avian viruses opportunity to spread. Sixty years later, the real question would be, why not?

I was late this morning. I'm going out to the deck to refill my feeder.

Tippi Hedren's iconic scene, now a famous meme