Visible crew/equipment: As Melanie drives up to have dinner at Mitch's, the reflection of the cameraman on the inside of the window can be seen moving in the upper-left hand portion of the screen. (00:32:10)
The Birds (1963)
1 review
Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock
Starring: Jessica Tandy, Rod Taylor, Suzanne Pleshette, Tippi Hedren
Your rating
Average rating
(15 votes)
The Birds presents a quiet community by a bay where its normally placid avian population inexplicably grows violent and driven to relentlessly attack the humans present! Suspenseful and frightening in vision, The Birds remains a very effective horror-thriller classic even decades later as men, women and children are all vividly harried by the homicidal creatures! Hitchcock flips the script from mundane to monstrous, tranquil to terrifying! Watch for Tippi Hedren as a young fashionable woman who is caught in up in the nightmare, Jessica Tandy as an overbearing mother who's own fears threaten to strangle her household, Rod Taylor as her devoted son, and then-child Veronica Cartwright as innocent Cathy, who ironically receives two lovebirds just as the rest of the bird-kind become a threat! A must-see for Hitchcock fans, horror enthusiasts and film students alike.
More mistakes in The Birds
Mitch Brenner: Aren't those lovebirds?
Melanie Daniels: No, those are, uh, red birds.
Mitch Brenner: Oh, I thought they were strawberry finches.
Melanie Daniels: Oh, yes. We call them that, too.
Trivia: Tippi Hedren actually received a cut on her face by a bird in one of the shots.
Question: What's making the birds go insane and attack people?
Answer: None of the characters knew why the birds attacked, or the reason it was confined to the one town of Bodega Bay. The incident was so isolated that the outside news media was barely aware it was occurring or knew its severity, so there was no investigation into it at the time. Alfred Hitchc0ck's explanation was that the birds were rising up against humans to punish them for taking nature for granted.
Join the mailing list
Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. Addresses are not passed on to any third party, and are used solely for direct communication from this site. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Check out the mistake & trivia books, on Kindle and in paperback.
Answer: It is never explained, probably because it would ruin the mystery of the film to spell it out.
If you are a Hitchcock fan, you pay attention to dialogue. They mention quite often that it started Melanie's arrival, of which she brought 2 caged birds. The rest is implied.