GOD'S POV - The door that wasn't there

"Movies are magic, and I think that's what made Hitchcock so special" - Veronica Cartwright

All about 'The Birds' by  L. Bouzereau (2000)

☻☻☻☻

The one above is that door; which is not a door, obviously; it is just Rod Taylor moving his arm as if he was opening a door, and the light from "the outside", that is ...well, light. Camera. Action!

The Birds is a piece of cinema history directed by the greatest cinematographic author who ever lived:

(on the left)

The fact that in 1963 he decided to put a "supernatural" or "metaphysical" issue in a movie -the mystery here is why the birds are attacking and killing the people, and it's not going to be explained anyhow- is an extremely interesting clue about his cinematic progress, after his directing incomparable masterpieces such as Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho.... and everything before. From The Birds on, his movies are somehow less and less hitchcok -except for his last British, dark, sleazy, and desperate movie, Frenzy (See) in 1972- so we could even consider The Birds to be the apex of his cinema, the highest peak where -of course, not by accident- "Bird's eye" views or perhaps -as the production designer Robert Boyle argues in this doc- "God's POV" is just necessary because of the very nature of the subjects -and title- of the movie. I mean, Motion Picture. =) In the "real world", the highness of his intent turned out to be another quasi-impossible thing to shoot, in fact, mostly impossible, so that the production of this movie needed to use a number -371, as Hitch himself recalls- of "trick shots", and became some sort of a cinematic jam session with writers, actors, technicians, trainers, painters... And -yes- a LOT of birds.

Here we find interviews to Hitch's daughter, Patricia Hitchcock:

along with a number of the great professionals and/or artists involved in the production, not least the male star Rod Taylor

here talking about chasing a seagull that broke loose while filming, and Tippy Hedren

telling some pretty interesting, and nevertheless funny anecdotes.

In particular, about their relationship with winged colleagues like Buddy

- a wonderful raven who used to visit Hedren in her dressing room and she describes as "smart" - and Archie:

the one who pinches Taylor's hand in the final scene, just as he kept trying to do all the time on the set, so that the man was kind of terrified by his very presence, and in 2000 he still was afraid to run into that bird...
The whole cast made a solemn oath

to never reveal the ending to anyone before the theatrical release, even though the very authors didn't know which ending to choose...

I liked even more this doc -if possible- because it really keeps what its title promises, by telling us just ALL about The Birds; even that we've never seen of it:

the apocalyptic and yet "open" finale we all know -and can't forget- was a matter of discussion for a long time; here we discover that an additional sequence after the famous birdscreen at dawn requested a whole month to be shot, with helicopters for aerial shooting and a lot of special and visual effects, with the birds attacking the car, and ravaged cities, and streets full with bodies of birds and humans...

Kind of:

But in the end the choice couldn't be better, and if The Birds is one of the most remarkable and brilliant movies ever made,  the final sequence is even more:

something Absolute.

More about the famous attic attack

about Hedren's fake scars

and real distress after five days with (unexpectedly) real birds thrown in her direction on the set, which left her quite exhausted in bed while the filming was almost over...

More about the soundtrack, and the collaboration with Bernard Herrmann:

and about their experimenting for the first time with that groundbreaking electronic technology

that eventually allowed them to score the whole thing without a single music note, just playing The Birds on keyboards... And something more about the other famous Tippy's murder:

in Psycho, (still a woman alone in a small place without any escape route, but beaks instead of the knife) of which is said: "They decided with music it would have been more effective"... I think that without music- so as Hitchcock wanted it to be- it would have been deadly, and if that scene is now regarded as one of the most terrifying scene ever made, without the famous Herrmann's "stabbing violins" it would be a serious psychological threat even for the modern audience... More or less, UNWATCHABLE.

Amongst many other little gems, here is finally pronounced one of the most valuable names in most of the Hitchcocks' casts, Albert Whitlock, the man who painted many of those fabulous scenarios, and if we supposed this scene 

to be just a flock of seagulls superimposed to an aerial (bird's eye, or "god"'s POV) shot of the town

now we know that only moving things like cars, fire and people was really there:

and then Whitlock painted the whole town around it:

Director/producer L. Bouzereau is the author of many other making-ofs, that is my favourite genre of movies nowadays; last month we've seen the interesting Guilt Trip, the making-of The Wrong Man, that deserved a three-very-happy-faces (See) but either for the movie itself, for the pretty extraordinary making-of-it per se,  and the quantity and the quality of information displayed here, this one is by far better and it deserves four happy faces, just like a Hitchcock... This is kind of disturbing.

Not to tell about Peter Bogdanovich, already seen in the previous Guilt Trip (see) and at least three other documentaries (reviewed here and here) showing no intention to be over and done with it:

I guess his real job in the early 2000s was to talk about the past in interviews...
Well, I just don't envy him.

There's one and only thing I really wanted to write to/about Mr. Hitchcock; in fact, I've already done that before, but I won't miss a new opportunity to do it again:

THANK YOU, SIR!