Rated:

A black comedy moonlighting as a genuinely unsettling, horrific allegory, this Alfred Hitchcock classic somehow strayed from favour for awhile. At the time of its release, Variety described it as thus:

"Beneath all of this elaborate feather bedlam lies a hitch cock-and-bull story that's essentially a fowl ball."

Yet in the realm of popular mythology, it is now rivalled only by Psycho.

Set in the remote California coastal town of Bodega Bay, the story concerns a small group of unsatisfied creatures. Two women and a young girl are all fixed on one man (Rod Taylor), and when a fourth arrives from San Francisco with a certain determination in her heart, a menacing populace of birds descends on the town, wreaking terror and havoc, right up until the film's inscrutable ending.

But as ever, Hitchcock is also having a laugh. The cast has Jessica Tandy and Suzanne Pleshette going for it, and, in an exceptional use of an otherwise unusable actress, Tippi Hedren. This was by far her greatest role for Grace Kelly she wasn't and is now remembered chiefly for being the mother of Melanie Griffiths, making nasty and unsubstantiated attacks on Hitch wrecking her career (her lack of talent did that) and selling her autographs at high prices to help fund her animal charity.