Jettisoning the plot, the setting, the characters and in fact everything but the title and essential conceit from a (really) far superior short story by Daphne du Maurier, Hitchcock presents us with Melanie Daniels (Hedren), a spoiled young heiress infamous for behavior like jumping into fountains in Rome, though those of us inhabiting the age of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan might have trouble seeing what everybody's been making such a fuss about.

The film's meet-cute takes place in a San Francisco pet store, where stalwart small-town lawyer Mitch Brenner (Taylor) has gone to buy his younger sister Cathy (a very, very young Veronica Cartwright) a pair of lovebirds. Mitch is the kind of strait-laced guy who balks at even that, asking the pet store owner if he has any lovebirds who are just good friends—which means that this film contains the world-record holder for single silliest pet store conversation regarding birds in those innocent days before John Cleese got into the act. He doesn't approve of Melanie, and he lets her know it, in a breathtaking display of contempt that, of course, immediately makes her want to track him down for further conversation.

She gets as far as his small seaside town of Bodega Bay before a sea gull attacks her for no particular reason. This seems an isolated incident until the weight of evidence persuades Melanie and others that the local birds are massing for attack. In one horrific incident, the birds attack schoolchildren; in another, they trap Melanie in a phone booth and cause a terrible explosion at the town's gas station. Naturally, a local hysteric blames Melanie, crying: "Why are they doing this? Why are they doing this? They said when you got here, the whole thing started. Who are you? What are you? Where did you come from? I think you're the cause of all this. I think you're evil! EVIL!" Just as naturally, Melanie and the Brenner family soon find themselves barricaded inside a house, the windows boarded up, the glass shattering as angry birds attack ...

Hitch's sole fantastic vision

As the years passed and the name of the master of suspense receded into the past, where it became inaccessible to people whose pop-culture knowledge only goes back as far as breakfast, The Birds spent some time with Psycho as one of the two Alfred Hitchcock movies that could be named even by people who couldn't name any other Alfred Hitchcock movies. Only a few short years ago, a short 3-D film of a bird attack played at the Alfred Hitchcock attraction at Universal Studios in Florida, where it was deeply enjoyed by park attendees of the sort who, more often than not, then raised their hands and innocently asked the tour guide whether Hitchcock had ever made any other movies. This is true. This happened. Your friendly reviewer witnessed it more than once, and must report that the deadly dulling effect of time was further evidenced when the Hitchcock exhibit was closed because the majority of park guests hadn't heard of him at all.

Under these deeply depressing circumstances, it would be nice now to spend some time waxing rhapsodic about Hitchcock's vast genius. Alas, The Birds was the product of a master entering a sharp decline, a man who had already made the last of his many great movies with Psycho and who would now spend his last years churning out mediocrities and worse, until irrelevance and infirmity sidelined him. The film contains some terrific set pieces—not just the bird attacks, which even with their dated special effects still possess the capacity to shock, but scenes of artfully gathering tension, like the one where birds accumulate on a jungle gym in a school playground, and the one where an elderly ornithologist scoffs at the very idea of bird attacks until traumatized into silence by the evidence of her own eyes—but the characters are charmless by Hitchcockian standards, many of the performances are charisma-free, and Melanie in particular is a chilly harridan of the sort not much improved by close encounters with nature run amuck. Even the late Evan Hunter, better known as the best-selling mystery writer Ed McBain, would come to deprecate his own screenplay, citing bad lines he composed that Hitchcock desperately wanted to edit out of the film but couldn't because they were imbedded in dialogue for which no adequate coverage existed. It's no North by Northwest, no Vertigo, no Rear Window. That's for sure.

Still, nobody who ever encountered the homicidal gulls of Bodega Bay at the right age ever forgot them, and nobody who ever saw the schoolchildren running in terror from the crows will ever feel fully safe whenever a winged shadow passes between them and the sun. And it was as close as one of the greatest movie-makers of all time ever got to making a fantasy or science fiction movie.