Hitchcock masterwork ‘The Birds,’ filmed in Bodega, turns 60

“The bird attacks have subsided for the time being,” reports the announcer. “Bodega Bay seems to be the center, though there are reports of minor attacks in Sebastopol, and a few on Santa Rosa.”

The attacks “come in waves,” he goes on, “with long intervals between. The reason for this does not seem clear as yet.”

Six decades later it’s still not clear what made those winged creatures turn their fury — and talons, and beaks — on humanity.

Accusations of misconduct

In a broad sense, says Marco Calavita, a professor of communication and media studies at Sonoma State University, “Hitchcock is saying that a lot of the characters need to learn a lesson. People were sinful, he was sinful, and maybe humanity deserved to be punished.”

In a narrower sense, he continues, Melanie needed to be punished. Calavita has discerned in each of the five movies Hitchcock released from 1958 to 1964 — “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” “Psycho,” “The Birds” and “Marnie” — a recurring, implicit message.

That message, he says, is that women who are too independent, “including sexually,” or perceived as immoral, “get punished harshly, in different ways.”

While her character was being punished in the movie, Calavita points out, Tippie Hedren was being punished in real life by the director, with whom she had a “complicated relationship,” the actor would later say.

To get the climactic scene where she is attacked in the attic, Hedren endured five days of filming during which handlers hurled live ravens, doves and pigeons at her, an exhausting experience she described as “brutal and ugly and relentless.”

Hedren would later accuse Hitchcock, who died of renal failure in 1980, of stalking and sexual misconduct. She recalled in her 2016 memoir that during the filming of “Marnie,” which followed “The Birds,” the legendary director entered her dressing room and “put his hands” on her. “It was sexual, it was perverse, and it was ugly,” she wrote.

She kept quiet about it, Hedren later explained, because “sexual harassment and stalking were terms that didn’t exist” in the early 1960s.

Follow-up to ‘Psycho’

Calavita is a Hitchcock aficionado who is interviewed at length in “78/52,” a 2017 documentary focusing on the shocking shower scene in “Psycho.

So disturbing was that script that Hitchcock’s studio, Paramount, refused to finance the picture. So the jowly auteur made the film with his own money — and made a fortune.

That film proved to be the highest grossing of his career. How would Hitchcock follow it up?

He’d long had his eye on “The Birds,” a short story by the British writer Daphne du Maurier, whose work he’d twice adapted to the big screen. “Jamaica Inn” was released in 1939, “Rebecca” the following year.

Psycho was a horror film “based on things happening inside a building” — the Bates Motel — “inside a person’s mind,” notes Sidney Gottlieb, a professor of Media & the Arts at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut.

So it made sense for Hitchcock to follow that with “The Birds,” which “has a psychological dimension, but also very much focuses on threats that are out there in the world.”

While du Maurier set her tale in her native county of Cornwall, shortly after World War II, Hitchcock transplanted the killer birds to the Sonoma Coast, where clouds and fog would help capture the mood of the picture. (He was vexed, when it came time to shoot the movie, by consistently sunny weather.)

Based on real events

But “The Birds” also was based on a real-life avian attack. In August 1961, the city of Capitola, on Monterey Bay, was beset with an aggressive flock of sooty shearwaters, which began slamming into homes and cars. Scientists later concluded that they suffered from domoic acid poisoning caused by a buildup of toxic algae.

Hitchcock, who owned a nearby estate in the mountains above Santa Cruz, was fascinated by those reports, and called the local newspaper for further details. Screenwriter Evan Hunter wove details of the sooty shearwater incident into his script.

“Something like this happened in Santa Cruz last year,” proclaims a traveling salesman at the bar in The Tides. “The town was just covered with seagulls!”

His account is corroborated by the chain-smoking ornithologist Mrs. Bundy, who is dismissive of Melanie’s claims that the birds mean them harm.

“Birds are not aggressive creatures,” she tut-tuts. “They bring beauty into the world. It is mankind who insists upon making it difficult for life to exist on this planet.”

That’s about as close as Hitchcock comes to telling us why the birds attacked.

No easy answers

Yes, it’s a story of revenge, on one level, says Gottlieb, longtime editor of the Hitchcock Annual, and a board member of the annual Alfred Hitchcock conference, HitchCon. “He’s constantly reminding us of our irresponsibility, how our bad actions come back to haunt us.

“Hitchcock wants us to think, ‘Oh, my God, we’ve really made a mess of this, and this is nature’s revenge.’”

But there’s a lot more going on. Du Maurier’s “The Birds” was “very much a post-World War II story,” Gottlieb says. It tapped into widespread anxiety around “threats from the sky” — whether they were atomic warheads or … bloodthirsty gulls.

Beyond that, the director is posing questions even more profound around what Gottlieb calls “the inscrutability of the world — our inability to get a handle on why things happen the way they do.”

Gottlieb cites the Hitchcock scholar Robin Wood, who believes “the birds represent the eruption of chaos, of unpredictability … everything that we don't understand and can't control about our world — not only the physical world but also the world inside us.”

The director leaves us clues, Gottlieb says. “He wants us to consider an answer, but also to ponder the possibility that there may be no answers.”

Sixty years from now, in other words, we still won’t know why the birds attacked, or why Melanie went into the attic.

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.