The Birds

After 30 years of clunking around this world I finally saw Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds". I laughed so hard at one point that I almost cried. I am sure that in 1968 this movie was "the bees' knees" as far as suspense films go. The sodium screen process used was tremendously innovative at the time and creates some believable moments. You can also see the influence of Hitchcock in Shalmylan, King, and other suspense/horror films of the day (and I dare say in Lost as well). And that got me thinking...

What Hitch gave us was innovation. He was truly progressive in his use of film, camera angles, score and dialogue (or the lack thereof, The Birds for instance hardly has any music at all), and postmodern in his tendency to have entirely open ended endings. I'm afraid however that he may have opened Pandora's Box in another sense.

Psycho deals with a cross dressing murdered who keeps the corpse of his mother in her bedroom upstairs, Rear Window centers in part around a voyeuristic neighbor, Marnie is about a girl with suppressed memories of killing a man who tried to physically assault her mother (who was a prostitute), North By Northwest was edited to remove steamy dialogue, I wonder at times, did Hitchcock introduce much of what I detest about modern cinema. In Hitch's case, it would appear that most of these subjects were dealt with for the sake of the story, but still in their day, many of these topics were risque' (he was not ashamed to use eye catching cleavage for instance), and still are not entirely kosher today (which in my humble opinion is a good thing).