“and remem­ber, the next scream you hear may be your own !! ” — Alfred Hitchcock.

You might have come across the news that Kan­dasamy masks will be issued to the kids who come to the­atre. Don’t think it’s a new n great mar­ket­ing idea or a brand new pub­lic­ity stunt. No. Not at all. Cin­ema indus­try had much more vet­er­ans than our Kalaip­uli in the past, too. In 1963, as part of the movie pro­mo­tional scheme, ‘The Birds’ pro­mot­ers [ Uni­ver­sal stu­dios ] issued bird masks to the pub­lic who viewed the film in the­atres. Some Tamil film pro­duc­ers can also do the same to ask the audi­ence to wear bird masks ’ Come and watch the movie with­out brains ’ :)

 What do you think that can hor­rify the viewer ? Ser­ial killing, Haunt­ing Bun­ga­low, shady looks, hor­ror music, howl­ing dogs or wolves ? That’s the con­ven­tional way of hor­ri­fy­ing. Our mas­ter direc­tor Alfred Hitch­cock, didn’t think con­ven­tion­ally and just used spar­rows, crows, seag­ulls and their silence ! Not the ani­mated or enlarged kind of birds. Just ‘The Birds’.

If you still won­der n ask ’ What great dam­age birds can cause other than peck­ing or pok­ing ?’, pls watch this movie in the late night [ strictly ]. The orig­i­nal form was a short story named ‘the birds’ writ­ten by Daphne mau­rier.

Plot

The story begins with young Melanie meet­ing a lawyer Mitch Bren­ner in a pet shop. Mitch looks for a pair of love birds and Melanie pre­tends like a sales girl in the shop. After that, Melanie buy love­birds and decides to gift the same to Mitch; she gets his address and find his place in the island “Bodega bay”. She doesn’t meet him there and leave the birds in his home. While return­ing in boat, she encoun­ters a strange attack by a seag­ull. Mitch helps her and takes her home, where he lives with his pos­ses­sive mother Lydia and sis­ter Cathy.

 Strange inci­dents start to hap­pen in the island. Swarm of birds attack the chil­dren in a birth­day party; birds kill chicken farmer; birds dis­turb the school chil­dren etc., Peo­ple from the island are extremely fright­ened and start leav­ing to SFO. Mitch, Melanie and oth­ers stay locked in the house and the birds find the new way to get into the home to attack. No one know when the birds attack and when they remain silent. What hap­pens then is the climax.

View

The Bond movies always have a short action sequence before the title cred­its roll on and then the actual story begins. Hitch­cock uses the rever­sal the­ory. His story never gets into the prob­lem directly. Instead, he takes the time for audi­ence to think about some­thing else and present a dif­fer­ent side of the story. Like, in Psy­cho, the story starts with a work­ing girl steal­ing his boss’s money [ $ 40k ] and gal­lop­ing. But the actual hap­pen­ing was even more worse than the audi­ence could think of. I noticed this tech­nique play­fully and later found that there’s a term defined for this “Macguf­fin”. MacGuf­fin is some­thing that the story line is built upon, but it has no sig­nif­i­cant purpose.

Sim­i­larly, ‘The Birds’ start with a roman­tic encounter of Melanie and Mitch in a pet shop. She trav­els to Bodega bay, finds his pre­vi­ous lover and his fam­ily etc., All of them are just form­ing a plat­form for the actual movie. The story trav­els on its own flow [ may be first 40 mins ] until Melanie first come across a bird attack in the island. What hap­pens then can­not be explained in text. That’s the mas­tery of Hitchcock.

The beauty of this film is there is no back­ground music for this sus­pense thriller. That’s the height of creativity/confidence, a direc­tor can hold. Instead, the role of sound is extra­or­di­nary in this film. The use of sound and sound effects con­sciously changes between heavy noises and dead silences. The effec­tive usage of silence makes the audi­ence more ter­ri­fy­ing than the actual attack. The ulti­mate result was the viewer is fright­ened not only dur­ing the attack but even when noth­ing hap­pens. The best scene is to get the local school chil­dren to come out of the school, where 100s of birds slowly gather one by one and sit on a stand out­side the school [ with this school song “ris­tle–tee ros­tle–tee” in the back­ground ]. The other inter­st­ing shot was the bird’s view of the town in chaos.

The mother char­ac­ter was beau­ti­fully por­trayed for her pos­ses­sive­ness over any girl­friend of her son [ உல‌க‌ளாவிய‌ பிர‌ச்னை போலிருக்கு :) ]. The psy­cho­log­i­cal fric­tion was also por­trayed well.

In 2007, there was a news that some­body plans to remake this film with Naomi watts [ “The painted veil” hero­ine — Have you seen her in “21 grams” ?! ]. The hero­ine of this film [ Tippi Hedren ] asked this ques­tion in an inter­view, out of frus­tra­tion — “Why would you do that? Why? I mean, can’t we find new sto­ries, new things to do?”. I sec­ond and value her opin­ion. Some things can’t be remade again– just like Hitch­cock works. This movie is the grandpa for the movies that had ani­mal attack as the theme [ Jaws ].

Hitchcock’s films hap­pen to be time­less won­ders and they were filmed ahead of their time. I wish I could see all the Alfred Hitch­cock series in Sathyam or PVR kind of theatre.

B : காக்கை குருவி எங்க‌ள் ஜாதி — நீள் கடலும் மலையும் எங்கள் கூட்டம்.
H : அங்க‌ வேண்ணா அப்ப‌டி இருக்க‌லாங்க‌. இந்த‌ ப‌ட‌ம் பார்த்திருந்தா அப்ப‌டி பாடி இருக்க‌ மாட்டீங்க‌ ஸார் !

:)
Toto.

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