But the normality of the events around the San Francisco Bay eventually gives way to mania. The Birds starts out as one of Hitchcock’s lightest films, as it breezes along the road of broad humour and romance as Mitch (Rod Taylor) and Melanie (Tippi Hedren) strike up a flirtation in a petshop in a scene you’re more likely to associate with Howard Hawks than the master of suspense.

Hitchcock’s films were always fraught with tension – whether that be sexual, socio economic or over identity – but the fear at the heart of The Birds is cornered with a universal realism despite its high concept plot. Just months earlier, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation, with the early 60s representing the high point of friction between the US and the Soviet Union. Hitchcock’s film couldn’t have been released at a more apt time. Nuclear weapons are a fear that is absolute, 60 years later, they percolate the evening news as frantically as they did back then and they percolate with paranoia through Hitchcock’s adaptation of du Maurier’s story. The Second World War had made way for the Cold War as America and the Soviet Union engaged in ideological battle through proxies in Vietnam, Nicaragua and Korea all under the lurking shadow of nuclear weapons. But a decade had passed between the publication of du Maurier’s story and the making of Hitchcock’s film, and new anxieties were arising. Outside the devastation of Pearl Harbor, America knew nothing of such fears.

The randomised attacks of the creatures comment on the sheer helplessness of people on the ground. It’s this point that is central to du Maurier’s text – the bird attacks evoke the Blitz and the heightened state of anxiety that was everyday life in 1940s Britain. Britain’s population was at the mercy of the skies. Over 40,000 civilians perished in the blazes. Over two million houses were destroyed by Nazi bombs.

Britain, of course, had been pounded in World War II by the Luftwaffe as Nazi Germany unleashed the Blitz across 19. And there’s nothing you can do about it.ĭu Maurier’s short story comes from a quintessentially British perspective. Alfred Hitchcock’s third adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier story pivots from the rural Cornwall setting of the book to airy Bodega Bay in California, but otherwise stays faithful to the embedded anxieties of the Post-Second World War psyche fractured from six years of a war that barely left a square foot of the globe unscorched.

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