My favourite Hitchcock film: The Birds by Geoff Dyer | Film | The Observer

My favourite Hitchcock film: The Birds by Geoff Dyer | Film | The Observer:

From the outset, the film is replete with the visual and linguistic trappings of imprisonment. In the pet shop where they meet, randy Rod Taylor tells mischievous Tippi Hedren she "should be behind bars". The man in the general store who gives her advice on how to get to Bodega Bay, where Rod lives with his sister and widowed mum (Jessica Tandy), works behind some kind of cage. The harbour from which Tippi sets sail is lined with lobster nets and traps. And the women are variously imprisoned by the feminine necessities of heels too high to run in, perfectly constricting clothes and ozone-threatening quantities of hairspray.

Tippi is the potential exception. She accidentally frees a bird from its cage in the pet shop and is – or was – wild enough to have once leapt naked into a fountain in Rome. Relatively speaking, she's an animal – well, she's wearing a fur coat anyway. Attacked by a gull on the boat to Bodega Bay, she is both the birds' first victim and is later accused, vampire style, of bringing the avian plague with her.