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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spooky Owl!" data-source="post: 183846" data-attributes="member: 57984">THE BIRDS was also always a favorite. (Current audiences complain about it being too slow-burn in its pacing). But that gradual build-up is part of why it works so well, and even as a child, that never bored me for a millisecond. The silences are deafening. And the movie is a good example of how that eerie TwilightZone/Psycho/JFK/ColdWar vibe of the early-'60s could easily translate to color.Some people have disparaged model Tippi Hedren's performance, but I disagree. Her quirks and clipped elocution worked perfectly well, and she even seems oddly birdlike (even her name is "head wren"). Rod Taylor is quintessential leading man material. Husky-voiced Suzanne Pleshette is perfect as the doomed ex-girlfriend. And Jessica Tandy is properly haunted as Taylor's widowed mother. The real life Bodega Bay locations in northern California sleepily effective.The birds seem an obvious metaphor for nuclear build-up, such an issue at the time. And everyone feels so isolated from one another even when they're not, the breath of winter's approaching chill surrounding everything.Hedren's scenes in the phone booth and the attic feel close cousins to Janet Leigh's experience in Norman's shower. And horrific moments like that in Dan Fawcett's farmhouse crime-scene bedroom -- when Miss Tandy peeks around the bureau to find his bloody corpse, still in pajamas, his eyes pecked out -- still have the ability to shock despite decades of subsequent off-the-charts cinematic sadism and gore.The end of the world seems imminent. As much from the small, quiet moments. And in a way far more resonant and convincing than the 24/7 dystopian film and television projects of our current period.Numerous genre fans have cited the 1960s as the best decade for horror, for various reasons. THE BIRDS is maybe the best horror metaphor for what was going on at the time. And for issues we still haven't resolved, even if we've gotten used to them.<img src="https://www.bing.com/th?id=OIP.T10yEQt0slOJ1tewDZd-DAHaEA&pid=Api&rs=1" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />It's weird about that --- we have this image of the '60s, certainly TV in the '60s, of being more repressive and innocent, because it was several decades ago, with even the "sexual revolution" touted in the '60s emerging as a result of that repression. But I recall catching an old 1965 episode of GIDGET with Sally Field in which her friend and her father discussed the depressive funk the fifteen year old was in, and one of them suggested it might be the result of "sexual frustration."Sexual frustration? In a fifteen year old? In TV in the '60s?You couldn't even have that exchange today in American TV. Not in the same way. Yes, you can talk about a fifteen year old being molested by an exploitive adult. You can talk about a fifteen year old having under-aged sex due to destructive "peer pressure" or because they "want to be cool". But the very idea that a fifteen year old might be experiencing "sexual frustration" because they're not getting something which is actually natural for fifteen year old, and referring to it in a matter-of-fact way with no moralizing about it ---  well, that's just not the way it would go down today, as it were.So bygone eras like the '60s (and earlier) may have been more repressive or oppressive (or discreet)  in certain ways, but there also wasn't the infantilizing of the culture, or wide swaths of it, which exists in the present, where teens aren't permitted their own sexuality unless it's victim-y and/or ultimately destructive.<img src="https://i.pinimg.com/736x/f4/cb/7f/f4cb7f0a4e5f18637e5ca8bc4643b345--online-photo-gallery-sally-fields.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></blockquote>

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