The Birds (1963)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Thousands of birds flock into a seaside town and terrorize the residents in a series of deadly attacks.
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6 films that influenced The Birds
What critics say influenced The Birds
Gareth Edwards' 2014 "Godzilla" takes its cues from that great sequence, and from the 1954 original's Hiroshima-and-Nagasaki inspired tracking shot past a row of bloodied hospital patients, and the camcordered immediacy of " Cloverfield ," and the gas station sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds," and the Do Lung Bridge sequence of " Apocalypse Now ," in which American soldiers' enemies were portrayed as faraway shadows, shooting flares and yelling obscenities.
The second masterpiece Alfred Hitchcock contributed to the genre of small-town movies (the first was "Shadow of a Doubt," in 1943) was "The Birds," a film that's still underestimated for its brilliant structure and technical execution.
We now think of the golden age for cinema’s great thriller director as 1954 to ’63 (Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds), but the hitch is that a Second World War-era film, he declared a few times, was his personal pick.
Loosely based on a short story by Daphne Du Maurier (who also provided source material for Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn and Rebecca ), the film couldn't be simpler: birds attack humans.
Though I’ve been a fan of Hitchcock—the man’s work covers so many decades in such a vast variety of styles, is there anyone who is not?—I had always been drawn more to his sprightly, early American work like Rebecca, Notorious, and Suspicion than to his more stately late American work like Vertigo and The Birds.
Based on a disturbing short story by the macabre Daphne Du Maurier (who also penned Rebecca and Don't Look Now), Hitch builds some truly amazing sequences that are as audacious as they are experimental.
Along with The Birds and Psycho , Rope was one of the very first Hitchcock films I saw as a kid -- a dusty old videotape sitting on a shelf with an odd title scrawled on its edge.
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Loosely based on a short story by Daphne Du Maurier (who also provided source material for Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn and Rebecca ), the film couldn't be simpler: birds attack humans.
Though I’ve been a fan of Hitchcock—the man’s work covers so many decades in such a vast variety of styles, is there anyone who is not?—I had always been drawn more to his sprightly, early American work like Rebecca, Notorious, and Suspicion than to his more stately late American work like Vertigo and The Birds.