The Birds was one of the two films Hitch had definitely in the works at this time. The other was to be based on Winston Graham’s novel Marnie, which he had bought and got Joseph Stefano to write a treatment of with Grace Kelly in mind for the title role of the compulsive thief. At this time Grace Kelly had been married to Prince Rainier of Monaco for six years, had two children, and was apparently willing to consider the possibility of a return to acting. Having informally sounded her out on the question, Hitch offered her Marnie, and the idea of working with him again was too much to resist. But then unfortunately some busybody went to the trouble of actually reading the book. And all at once a big controversy was cooked up about whether it was proper for a princess to be playing a criminal on screen, even for the great Alfred Hitchcock. The upshot of this was that a referendum of the princess’s subjects was called for, and by a considerable majority they voted against her returning to the screen. Regretfully, she bowed to this show of public disapproval. Hitch was annoyed, and upset, and promptly put Marnie away, apparently for keeps, to concentrate all his attention on The Birds.
The original short story by Daphne du Maurier came from a collection published in 1952, which had been brought to Hitch’s attention as a possibility for adaptation as a half-hour television show, and included in one of his anthologies. The story, as so often with Hitch, provided no more than a nugget, the germ of an idea about a sudden, inexplicable, unmotivated attack by the birds of the world on humans. This appealed to Hitch’s constant idea of finding menace in the bright sunlight, in the most unlikely circumstances. We might accept the possibility of attack from a giant squid, or mutated ants the size of houses, but who would think that the little feathery creatures we see around us all the time could constitute a serious threat to civilization as we know it? From that one thought the whole screenplay by Evan Hunter (author of The Blackboard Jungle) was elaborated. In the process it acquired a location in Bodega Bay, a small fishing village north of San Francisco, and what appears until some way into the film to be an innocent, light-comedy love story between a spoilt San Francisco socialite and a somewhat unresponsive lawyer.
And this was where Tippi Hedren came in. Though Hitch admitted, ideally he would rather have had bigger stars than Tippi and Rod Taylor—say, Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant—to ensure immediate audience identification, the very long shooting schedule required for all the special effects and trick photography in the film would make them far too expensive. And anyway, he felt that his new discovery was ready for the role—or would be by the time he was ready to shoot. With this end in view he began to prepare her with unparalleled intensity and thoroughness. Strangely for him, with his reputation of never having much to say to actors, never going into psychological explanations, he took a great deal of trouble to involve her in every stage of the film’s preparation. She sat in on script conferences, meetings with set designers, the director of photography, the music supervisor, and had explained to her the colour planning of the film, the motivation of the characters and the structure and purpose of the whole picture, its periods of intensity and of relaxation, in the most minute detail before they ever started shooting. Hitch gave her an education in film-making it would otherwise have taken her fifteen years to acquire, always supposing she could have acquired it any other way.
Even during the shooting he never hesitated to help her along, to discuss all aspects of her role with her. On only one occasion did he put his foot down. She wanted to know, reasonably, what ever possessed her character, Melanie, to venture out of her room at night and up to the attic when she must be certain something terrible was waiting there. Of course, there was no reasonable answer except, ‘Because I told you to.’ And that, she felt, was for once in a picture fair enough. Though she would certainly rather have avoided what was waiting for her at the top of the stairs: an attack by birds which had to be shot with live instead of mechanical birds, as originally intended. The trouble with mechanical birds was that they just did not look lifelike. So for a whole week she had to suffer daily having live seagulls thrown at her in very narrow confines, and then later to lie on the floor with frantic birds tied with elastic bands and nylon threads to her arms and legs. It was, she says, the worst week of her life, but she went through it without complaint, and only became hysterical when a bird nearly clawed out one eye.
For a film of such extraordinary technical complexity, the shooting of The Birds went remarkably smoothly. It contains some 1,400 shots, about twice as many as the average Hitchcock film, 371 of them trick shots of one sort or another, mostly in the latter half, when the birds have begun to attack. Many of them had to be worked over and over with superimpositions and optical combinations to give the desired effect: the very last shot in the picture, in which the human characters seem to leave the world to the birds, combines no fewer than thirty-two different pieces of film. The secret, as usual, was all in Hitch’s meticulous pre-planning. From the earliest stage in the film’s preparation he had working with him not only his usual cinematographer Robert Burks, but Ub Iwerks, for years Walt Disney’s right-hand man, as special photographic adviser, Lawrence A. Hampton on special effects, Ray Berwick as trainer of the birds and his old friend and associate Al Whitlock, the accredited genius of matte work, as provider of ‘pictorial designs’. (Whitlock turns up in various capacities on the credits of a number of Hitch’s films, and some years later, when Hitch found that Universal, who had him under contract, were hiring him out at enormous profit to other companies in need of a matte-shot expert, he offered to finance him in the setting up of his own independent studio, well aware that this threat would persuade Universal to come up with a fairer remuneration for the relatively unbusinesslike Whitlock’s services.) This time the preparation went, of necessity, much farther than Hitch’s usual set of sketches indicating camera set-ups: the whole film was laid out as a story board, shot by shot. Throughout, Hitch carefully avoided ever asking of anything, ‘Can it be done?’ Instead he merely stated what they were going to do and set his team of expert technicians to work out how.
Curiously, and to himself inexplicably, Hitch found himself in an unaccustomedly emotional state during the making of The Birds. As a rule he prides himself on leaving work at the studio and detaching himself completely when he gets home—and in any case, he insists, all the excitement and involvement of creation is over by the time he begins work on the actual shooting. But with The Birds he found himself nervy and oppressed—possibly because of the kind of subject he was handling, a vision of Judgement Day for humanity, possibly for deeper-laid, more mysterious personal reasons. However that might be, the strange mood which was upon him shook him out of his habitual routine, according to which once he had finished to his satisfaction making the film in his head he would never look at the script again while making it in fact. This time he started studying the scenario all over again while shooting it, and found himself quite unhappy with some sections of it. So he began to do something he never normally did—improvise on set. He threw away completely the original concept of the scene in which the principal characters are besieged when the birds attack the outside of the house, and restaged the reactions there and then. Once started, he began to change quite a lot of things according to the inspiration of the moment, always moving deeper inside the characters, making the viewpoint far more subjective than he had originally intended, and in particular keeping the audience much closer to the Tippi Hedren character, Melanie, seeing things more or less through her eyes. Without going so far as to equate Hitch’s attitude with Flaubert’s ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi,’ one can at least see that while making the film he himself was going imaginatively through the experiences of his unfortunate heroine and in turn forcing his audience through them.
It is this which imparts such a strong emotional quality to a film which might easily have remained, in other hands, a brilliant but rather arid exercise in technical virtuosity. Technical virtuosity there is in plenty, sequence after sequence in which the
audience, once given a chance to think, is bound to wonder how on earth the effects were produced. But within the movie the audience is given precious little chance to stop and think. And though the over-all vision of the film is apocalyptic, there is room also for some typically ruthless Hitchcock humour, in the amorous sparring match of the opening, and in the scene in the restaurant which provides some relief in the midst of the horrors, with the old lady ornithologist (played by Ethel Griffies, an English actress, then eighty-five, whom Hitch remembered from the London stage in his childhood) and the drunk prophesying doom, a character compounded of many such in plays by Sean O’Casey and some slightly malicious memories of O’Casey himself.
Throughout production of the film certain vital elements remained deliberately fluid. It took Hitch a long time to settle on the right closing shot—for a while he toyed with the idea of having the fugitives from Bodega Bay arrive in San Francisco to find the Golden Gate Bridge completely covered with birds—before he decided to stick with the completely open ending the film now has. It proved, in fact, rather too open for Universal, the company for whom the film was made. Originally there was no ‘The End’ title; the film just faded out on the glistening, endless vista of birds, waiting … But on the insistence of Universal, rather to Hitch’s irritation, a final title was superimposed so that audiences would not be left too completely disoriented. In the editing Hitch decided to cut a couple of scenes he had shot, one of them a love scene between Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor, because he felt they slowed things down too much. And the sound-track this time needed special attention: once the picture was edited Hitch dictated a detailed sound script specifying how much sound and of what kind every moment of the film should have. He did not want music in the ordinary sense of the term, but with Bernard Herrmann he worked out a complete pattern of evocative sound and ‘silence’ which was then realized in Germany by Remi Gassman and Oskar Sala, specialists in electronic music.
The Birds was the first film on a new contract Hitch had made with Universal, but it was a continuation and extension of a longstanding personal and professional association, for Universal had been taken over completely by MCA, for whom, in their television incarnation as Revue, Hitch’s Shamley Productions had made all the Alfred Hitchcock Presents series and various other television shows. Moreover, the present head of Universal was Lew Wasserman, Hitch’s close personal friend who had been present at the emotional moment of announcing to Tippi Hedren that she was going to play Melanie in The Birds and had wanted for years to bring all Hitch’s activities together under one roof. The link was to be strengthened further the year after The Birds came out, when Hitch made over his rights in the television shows in return for stock in MCA, so that from then on he was in a very real sense his own employer at Universal—even though, as will be seen, that did not guarantee him the independence he desired.
Despite its lack of big, expensive stars, The Birds was the most expensive film Hitch had made to date, and it was launched with a big publicity campaign based on the catch-line, devised by Hitch himself, ‘The Birds is Coming.’ Oddly, critical reactions were rather lukewarm. Though praise for the birds themselves and all the special effects was pretty general, the critics tended to find the human characters dull and colourless, the opening section up to the first real attack by the birds too long, and in particular they were cool towards Tippi Hedren, in whom they looked for a new Grace Kelly and came away disappointed. All the same, the public liked The Birds, which turned out profitably for all concerned. Just as Psycho had set off a whole string of horror-comic exercises in outrage, the new film sparked numerous excursions to Armageddon, with mankind attacked by everything from rats to giant rabbits. Again, Hitch was just those few vital steps ahead.
Personally, though, he remained possessed by the strange mood which had come over him during the making of The Birds. He sought relief from it, as from all his personal problems through the years, in more work. In defiance of the critics, he still believed in the enormous potential of Tippi Hedren, and anyway he had her on a 52-weeks-a-year, 7-year contract, so he wanted to use her. Abruptly, he decided to reactivate the Marnie project, now as a vehicle for her. Joseph Stefano, who had started work on the adaptation of the book, was otherwise occupied, and in any case Hitch decided he wanted to depart more radically from the original, particularly by combining the attributes of two characters, the husband and the psychiatrist, and writing the role for a young, sexy actor instead of a father-figure (thereby pulling the same sort of switch he had with the Anthony Perkins character in Psycho). He began work on the script again with Evan Hunter, but then decided that maybe a female writer would be more in tune with his intentions and recruited Jay Presson Allan, who at that time was having a big theatrical success with her adaptation of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
Again, Tippi Hedren was in on the whole creative process of the film. But things were beginning to go a little sour in her relationship with Hitch. The situation of Trilby and Svengali can never be easy for either party. Hitch felt, understandably, that he had invented Tippi, taught her everything she knew, and made her a star. She should be duly grateful, and do exactly what he said. Grateful she was, but she was unwilling, or unable, to relinquish her independence completely. She had married her agent, Noel Marshall, she had a child, and felt the need of some life of her own. Under contract for every week of the year she might be, but she did not feel that gave Hitch the right to interfere in her private life, to decide what she should wear, where she should go and whom she should see every hour of the day. Though charming as ever when she did what he wanted, he was becoming in her eyes unreasonably possessive and domineering. There seemed to be trouble ahead.
For the moment, though, things went smoothly enough. The subject-matter of Marnie is strange enough in all conscience, dealing as it does with a sort of obsessional, fetishistic eroticism, according to which the man in the story is as sick as the girl, or as Hitch says, ‘We’re all perverted in different ways.’ Marnie is a compulsive thief, sexually frigid, the product of an unloving, man-hating mother and a childhood trauma which has left her with a terror of the colour red. Mark Rutland is a young, attractive, rich widower who develops a fixation on her as soon as he realizes she is a thief, desiring her because of rather than in spite of her compulsion. What interested Hitch from the outset was the strange sadistic relationship which develops between them, the ‘sub-text’ in which what Mark really wants is to catch Marnie in the act of thieving and rape her on the spot. Apparently through all the discussions of motivation and character with Tippi Hedren during the preparation of Marnie he never mentioned this to her, any more than he mentioned the urination scene at the back of his mind to Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman during the kiss sequence of Notorious. It was just something in his mind, which should come out on screen without being specified.
And this, no doubt, is what accounts for the extraordinary, otherwise inexplicable intensity of the finished film on screen. But also, since there is something almost telepathic about the way great directors work on their audiences through the medium of the cinema, it seems likely that the very strained relations which developed between Hitch and Tippi Hedren during the course of shooting have somehow left their residue in the performances: maybe Hitch is in some way taking a sublimated, psychological revenge on her in the way Mark (Sean Connery) has to dominate, rape and torment Marnie through the resolution of her trauma in the film. Certainly it was a very difficult film to do, highly emotional and demanding for its leading actress and everyone else concerned. Hitch was nervy, Tippi Hedren was nervy, just about everyone was nervy in the course of shooting. The crisis came when, about two-thirds of the way through, Tippi made what she considered a fairly reasonable request. She wanted to go east for a week-end to attend some charity function, and asked Hitch if he could slightly rearrange the shooting schedule to accommodate this. His answer was a flat no. Not only would it be inconvenient, but he thought a break like that, taking her o
ut of the mood they had created for the character (mainly by keeping her in virtual isolation during the shooting period), would harm her performance. She doubted this, she resented it, she really needed a break. Consequently, the unthinkable happened: there was a scene on set. This never happened to Hitch, never. And harsh things were said: afterwards all Hitch would volunteer was, ‘She did what no one is permitted to do. She referred to my weight.’ There was a total stand-off. For the rest of the film they communicated only through a third party: ‘Would you ask Miss Hedren to …?’ ‘Would you tell Mr. Hitchcock …?’
Amazingly, this all seems to have worked to the film’s good. It is probably the most controversial of Hitch’s works, his admirers being split down the middle between those who regard it as one of his masterpieces and those who find it embarrassingly talky, old-fashioned and slipshod. The case of the anti group depends largely—beyond a general and understandable unease with the film, which is very disturbing however you look at it—on some very casual process shots (of Marnie riding, for instance) and some even more stagy and artificial painted backdrops, notably that at the end of the street where Marnie’s mother lives. But that at least, whether successful or not, was deliberate: Hitch wanted to recreate the unreal, dreamlike effect he had seen two or three times in his life, in Southampton, and again in Wellington, New Zealand, of ships looming surrealistically above the roofs of houses, with no evidence of water to explain them or give perspective. And as for the rest, he has never cared too much, right back to silent days in England, about giving more than a formal nod towards what he considers technical inessentials. If you get the idea that a character is riding a horse, that is all you need; to be completely literal about it is excessive.
Hitch: The Life and Times and Alfred Hitchcock Page 32