The moment doesn't escalate into violence, as it does in Psycho, but the sense of surprise, of violation, of vulnerability is exactly the same.  The similarity of the two scenes is too great to be coincidental — and I think we can see Lewton's influence on another important Hitchcock film.  The whole tone of Vertigo — quiet, dreamlike, subtly, ambiguously ominous — is far closer to the tone of Lewton's RKO horror films than it is to Rebecca, which is essentially a very classy and delicate rendition of the spooky atmosphere found in old-fashioned Gothic fiction.

The house, with its ghost, haunts the heroine of Rebecca.  In Lewton's films, and in Vertigo, the whole world is haunted, unhinged — it has become a spooky maze with no exits.  Hitchcock's innovation was to create Lewton's deranged dream world in color, in California sunshine — which is ultimately much more unsettling.

Robin Wood’s thoughtful and penetrating analysis of The Birds in Hitchcock’s Films Revisited is ultimately
disappointing
to me, because I don’t think Wood gets at the thematic heart of the
film, although he does acutely perceive its nature, it’s basic aesthetic
strategy, which is one it shares with all of Hitchcock’s great films —
and I think The Birds is one of Hitchcock’s great films.

The characteristic strategy of The Birds is to lure
the viewer into largely unconscious emotional reactions to images and
situations and then to shift the perceptual ground slightly (or
shockingly, as the case may be) in such a way that the viewer is
compelled to become conflicted about those reactions, consciously or
not.

The goal with Hitchcock is always to heighten moral
and/or spiritual awareness but his methods never involve pronouncements
of any kind, and thus rarely involve symbols than can be reduced to a
precise intellectual meaning.  He is only interested in the psychic
currents
which he can tap, appeal to and uncover within the experience of the
viewer as he or she watches the film.

All great artists work this way of course, but if you
think that Hitchcock is just an entertainer, a supplier of sensation
for its own sake, a clever if eccentric practitioner of genre, you will
miss (at least on a conscious level) the full depth of his art.

So when Wood says that the birds in The Birds don’t
symbolize anything specific he is quite correct.  But what the birds
do, and when they do it — their function as psychic agents in a
narrative about characters we are alternately drawn to and suspicious
of
— are crucial issues.

The film opens with a man in a pet shop trying,
unsuccessfully, to buy a pair of lovebirds as a gift for his young
sister.  In the shop he meets a woman who’s attracted to him, later
buys the pair of lovebirds and drives them up to the remote fishing
village where the man’s sister lives, and leaves them for her.  The
film ends with the young sister carrying the birds on an escape through
an apocalyptic landscape — devastated by a lethal revolt . . . of
birds.

What’s going on here?  The lovebirds are not symbolic
per se in the artistic scheme of the film — they’re an image that
means different things to different characters at different stages of
the narrative.  What’s crucial, it seems to me, is that the lovebirds
are a couple and that they live in a cage.  They incarnate a paradox —
are they trapped, or are
they safe?  They’re both, obviously — but which condition is most
important?  That’s the question the film poses, and answers, after a
fashion.

The woman in the pet shop is an irresponsible heiress
— a bird in a gilded cage, as Wood observes, but alone.  When she runs into a man who
wants lovebirds in a cage, she develops what seems to be an irrational
attraction to him.  The imagery is very ambiguous here, but suggestive.  Is she looking
for company in her cage, a man who’ll share her prison with her? 

It turns out that the man is the son of a woman who
lost her husband, his father, and is thoroughly traumatized by the
loss.  She clings to her son, interferes with his desire to find a
partner of his own — places an intolerable burden on him to become the
head of the family, father to his sister.  The mother’s grasping is not
Oedipal, exactly — it’s more a terror of being alone, of being
incomplete.  The family’s loss of its father/husband has created a
vacuum in which neurosis breeds.

So the lovebirds, to the man, are an image of the
wholeness he can’t supply — a magical substitution which might allow
him to seek his own wholeness in a new relationship.

The lovebirds may not mean exactly the same thing to
the man and the woman in the pet shop but they crystallize each
other’s
deepest needs and desires.  How could they not fall in love in the
presence of such an image?

But the image won’t stay put — won’t stabilize itself
for either of them.  Other birds, uncaged birds, gather above them
menacingly.  The man catches the woman delivering the lovebirds to his
sister, is
touched, intrigued, drawn to her, as she obviously is to him.  At that
moment a seagull attacks the woman, for no apparent reason.

Later, the woman reveals to the man that her mother
deserted her when she was child.  At that moment a flock of birds
suddenly attacks the children at the sister’s birthday party.  It’s as
though the creatures have emerged demonically from the woman’s ravaged
psyche.

The bird attacks grow more numerous, more lethal, more
surreal.  They attack the man and the  sister and the mother in their
own home, where the woman is visiting.  There seems to be no defense,
no hiding place.  But a new family is forming, as the man and the woman
fall deeper and deeper in love, as the sister comes to rely on the
woman emotionally, as the mother slowly softens towards her.

The birds pause in their attack.  The family decides
to make a run for it.  The sister insists on carrying the lovebirds in
their cage.  As they drive away though fields of menacing, roosting,
temporarily placid birds, the mother takes the woman in her arms, in a
mother’s embrace.

The lovebirds in their cage have become a talisman of
salvation — an image of the confinement of commitment, the cage of
family and love, but also of immunity from outright destruction.  It’s
like the bait and switch Hitchcock engineered in Shadow Of A Doubt,
where the “oppressive” and suffocating prison of the family, as we see
it at the beginning of the film, is revealed as the only refuge against
forces darker than anyone in that family could ever have imagined.

Only the lovebirds in their cage are free,
provisionally at least. Outside the cage is simply irrational,
meaningless horror.  This is not exactly a conservative or romantic
endorsement of committed love and family.  Happiness is not really at
stake here, much less moral rectitude or an all-encompassing psychic fulfillment — only
survival.  So why is that mother’s embrace at the end of the film so
powerful, so profound, so moving?  Because it’s something, set against
nothing.

The newly constructed family drives off jammed into a
small sports car, caged.  They incarnate a paradox — are they trapped,
or are they safe?  Both,
obviously — but which condition is most important?  It’s clear enough
which way the film leans on this issue, but Hitchcock isn’t making any
promises.  He insisted that “The End” not appear at the film’s close —
partly as a gimmick (“The birds are still out there!”), partly to keep
the psychic and moral tension alive in the audience . . . but also
partly, no doubt, because he knew subconsciously that he would return
to the female protagonist of this film again, would explore her
existential jeopardy in greater depth, which he did in Marnie, using the
same actress, playing a very similar lost soul in search of a mother’s
embrace.





The hidden, poisoned springs of many Hitchcock films run through the
pathology of dysfunctional parents, shattered, perverted families,
wrecked marriages — and the provisional redemption these films offer
often involves new families reconstructed on the ruins of old
ones.  Hitchcock’s view of the family, all families, was ambiguous
— and his passionate defense of the family as a bastion against
terror, against meaninglessness, was inflected by this ambiguity. 
Even so, his view was inaccessible to many critics, like Wood, who
were, for personal and political reasons, deeply suspicious of the
family as a social phenomenon — an attitude that became fashionable,
almost a matter of faith, among 20th-Century intellectuals.  Wood
wanted to analyze The Birds
as a vision merely of conflict between order and disorder, missing the
fact that, for Hitchcock, this conflict was centrally bound up with the
idea of family.



Hitchcock was canny.  He knew that society cannot face its deepest
concerns, its deepest fears, directly.  He knew that those fears
had to be displaced in art, given an indirect expression — blamed, as
it were, on the birds.

The original cut of Psycho
which Alfred Hitchcock delivered to Paramount ran just under nine
hours.  Hitchcock lobbied hard to have the film released at this
length, in a special day-long presentation with two intermissions, but
violent reactions from audience members who saw test screenings of
the nine-hour version (including, reportedly, at least two
unpublicized suicides) convinced the director to cut the film
drastically and release it at a normal length.



All prints of
the original cut were thought to have been destroyed — until early
this year when one somehow turned up in the basement of a house under
demolition in St. Louis.  The house had once belonged to a man
who owned a small chain of movie theaters in the Midwest, and apparently at least one
print had made it to one of those theaters, presumably for test
purposes.



Robert Harris, who has restored several classic films, including Hitchcock's Vertigo, and will be restoring the uncut Psycho,
is one of the few people who's watched the new footage in its
entirety.  Harris reports that the famous shower scene runs to
forty-five minutes in Hitchcock's original cut and personally made him
sick to his stomach.  “It's film history,” says Harris, “and needs
to be preserved, but I can't say I'm happy that this new version has
survived.  The world would be a better place without it.”



Picture
negative and original sound elements for the new footage do not survive, so the
reconstruction will be uneven.  Universal, which now controls the film, plans to release the
uncut Psycho in a three-disc special edition late in 2008.

Alfred Hitchcock was raised a Catholic and educated by
the Jesuits.  The influence of his Catholic upbringing is evident in
his films, sometimes in surprising ways.

On a purely psychological level, Hitchcock was
attracted to stories in which someone is judged unfairly,
mistaken for someone else and asked to pay for that other person’s
sins.  This is a common enough response to the harsh and demanding educational
system of the Jesuits — a sense of living under perpetual (and
seemingly unjust) accusation.  In many Hitchcock movies the unfairly
accused protagonist redeems himself by heroic actions — which in
theological terms might be related to the doctrine of justification by
works, the idea that a man can, with a little help from God, save
himself by his own actions.

But there’s deeper and more complex theology at work in certain of
Hitchcock’s films — most notably in I Confess and The Wrong Man.
Interestingly enough, these are two of the director’s most naturalistic
films, shot in great part on location and in black and white.  It’s odd
that when he wanted to delve most deeply into religious themes he
should have chosen to present them in a quasi-documentary form.

In I Confess a priest, played by Montgomery Clift, is unjustly accused of a
murder.  The real killer has confessed to him, but he can’t, as a
matter of religious conviction, tell anybody about it.  In this film,
the protagonist does not redeem himself except by passive sacrifice.
His heroism is simply to accept his fate humbly, stick to his faith.

His convictions here are church-related — he must
sacrifice himself to the principle of the sanctity of the confessional,
to ecclesiastical procedure.  He’s saved from paying the ultimate
penalty by the witness of another character, who sacrifices herself to
reveal his innocence.  Presumably his own sacrificial posture has
inspired her to this act.

So far we are well within the Catholic tradition, which sees the church, personified in the figure of the priest, as a divine agent in the world — adherence to its doctrine and ritual leads to salvation.

But something very different is going on in The Wrong Man.  Here an innocent man, played by Henry Fonda, is accused of a crime and his whole life is
shattered.  He’s a religious man, and carries his rosary beads with him
through his ordeal — but it doesn’t seem to help.  The wheels of
justice, the oppression of the legal system, operating quite reasonably
on the face of it, crush him like an insect.

Finally his mother asks him to pray — and he does,
not with the rosary beads, not in a church, but directly to an image of
Jesus.  Instantly, the real criminal appears and is caught — the
accused man is redeemed.

This is a long way from Catholic theology in that the
church plays no mediating role.  It’s just between “the wrong man” and
Jesus.  He’s saved by no action of his own, not even by the humble
acceptance of his fate.  He’s saved by a simple cry for help.

We’re now, oddly enough, in Protestant theological territory, closer
to the doctrine of justification by faith, in which neither the church
nor the suffering man play any role whatsoever in the man’s salvation,
which is a gift of Grace from God, pure and simple.

It’s clear that in these two films Hitchcock was not just expressing resentment over the terrors and the residual guilt inculcated by a Catholic
education.  He was articulating complex themes in Christian
thought, trying to dramatize them in an entertaining way but also to
situate them in the real world, in a plausible evocation of modern-day
Quebec, where I Confess is set, and New York, where The Wrong Man
is set.

“Film is not a slice of life,” Hitchcock famously
said, “it’s a slice of cake”.  But there’s very little cake on display
in either of these films — and in the mean streets of The Wrong Man,
in the suffocating rooms and cells and hallways of police stations and
prisons and courthouses, there is only wormwood and gall.

The two films stand out as great and profound works of
Christian art, explicit meditations on Christian theology in a century
(and an industry) not noted for such concerns.  Like all good parables
they can be enjoyed simply as stories, but Hitchcock makes it very
clear (see the image from I Confess at the beginning of this post) that he had heaven on his mind when he made them, that he was
asking deep questions about the nature and the mechanism of salvation.