Two horror masterclasses from 1963 on Midnight Screenings.
At the apex of his commercial and artistic powers in 1963, Alfred Hitchcock was a cinematic god with a devil’s temper and an imp’s sense of cackling humor, both of which are fastened ruthlessly to The Birds. No other director could have masterminded the insurrectionist Psycho and survived on the A-list, but even Psycho, released three years before The Birds, had its condolences to the audience, markers of forgiveness that The Birds has no earthly investment in.
Let’s pair it with the otherwise rambunctious Psycho for contraposition and awareness of Hitch’s renewed confidence in The Birds. The final scene of Pyscho, a superior film overall, is ice water on the film’s lusty, libidinal fire, thawing everything out before our eyes by pushing his inexplicable film through the throngs of explication in a final, miserable scene. The greasy sense of sweat-soaked temptation, the morbid shattered-psyche suggestion of the images, and the jittery, frayed spark of the brutal filmmaking and psychosexual implication unravel before our eyes in the great cinematic cop-out ending, where Hitch dredges up a psychiatrist to explain away the terror of male desire and modernist aimlessness by diagnosing it with a name. The ever droll The Birds, however, has no salve for its fatalistic rapture. It saunters in like a volcano ready to erupt, hangs around, and although you may leave, this mordant thresher disfiguring the human species isn’t about to gift us an explanation or an excuse for itself. This late in his career, Hitch didn’t need one. Continue reading →