However, The Birds differed from Psycho in many ways. It was in color instead of black and white, and its only score consisted of squawking birds. In some ways, it was even more of a departure from Hitchcock's style than was Psycho. The latter was a murder mystery, however macabre. The only mystery in The Birds is the truculent behavior of the title characters, for which fortunately no explanation is presented.

A bad science fiction movie would have blamed the killer birds on a comet, a meteorite, an atomic explosion, or the Kennedy Administration. Hitchcock is above such nonsense, and sticks to the game plan: the reactions of innocent people attacked by ill-tempered birds.

Although the growing threat of the belligerent birds eventually dominates the movie, the focus in initial scenes is the relationship between Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor. Both are financially and emotionally independent, and their self-satisfied demeanor initial pushes them away from each other, like magnets of the same pole.

Yet their courtship progresses, partly because the plot depends on it, but also since their need to one-up the other requires a further confrontation. Hedren is the stranger in town in Bodega Bay, and the requirement of Taylor to play the gracious host eventually overcomes his disposition to needle her.

Hedren was a relative unknown, and thus an unusual choice by Hitchcock to carry the lead role in a big budget film. It is too easy to writer her off as a poised model, however. After all, she is perfectly cast as the frosty blonde leading lady type favored by Hitchcock. When she hesitatingly says, "I had a booster before I went abroad last May," the inflections are correct. But her limitations are revealed during the gas pump fire, when successive shots show her open mouthed by otherwise blandly expressive.

It would be unfair to dissect Hedren's performance without subjecting Rod Taylor to the same scrutiny. His character makes a fairly smooth transition from smug cad to determined defender, but he does make one minor slip-up. At the children's party, he carries a bird-attacked girl to the porch. He sets the child down several feet from the door and quietly states, "In you go." A more dramatic rescue is called for, such as bearing the urchin through the front door to safety. Of course, Hitchcock is as much to blame for this omission as is Taylor.

The most noted actor on the set is stage legend Jessica Tandy. Although in a supporting role, she is given two big scenes. In the second, she reveals to Hedren her fear of being abandoned by Taylor. This discussion is an anticlimax, because it simply confirms Suzanne Pleshette's theories from a previous conversation. Tandy is given more to work with in her first big scene, where she learns the fate of Mr. Forsette. Her trepidation of intruding on Mr. Forsette's privacy is paramount until it is replaced by wordless shock.

The Birds is not a masterwork, unlike Psycho. By horror film standards, however, it is a good movie. It is more inspired than Torn Curtain, the Cold War potboiler that Hitchcock delivered later that decade.