Continuity mistake: As everyone runs out of the restaurant, the bushes on the left of the building that were there before are gone. (01:26:10)
The Birds (1963)
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Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock
Starring: Jessica Tandy, Rod Taylor, Suzanne Pleshette, Tippi Hedren
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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: When we see the school children running away from the birds, they were actually running on a treadmill with Bodega Bay footage added in the background.
Question: When the birds attack the town a gas station attendant is hit by a bird and drops the gas hose he is using to fill a car. The gasoline flows down the street and under a car; a man drops a match and lights the gas causing an explosion. Why didn't the gas pump shut off when the man dropped it?
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Answer: The movie takes place in the 1960s, so presumably gas pumps worked a bit differently back then. This is also a small town and probably the gas station had not modernized. There may not have been automatic shut-offs, or if there was, it was faulty.
raywest ★
The automatic shut off is in the handle of the hose. When a person grips the handle they have to lift a levered switch to allow gas flow; the lever is spring loaded so that if it is released the gas will stop flowing. I have looked at older antique gas pumps and they are all the same; even the visible glass gravity flow ones. If that hose was dropped the the gas should have stopped flowing.
michael g