![]() In this case, adapting du Maurier’s 1952 story of the same name, originally published in the short story collection “The Apple Tree,” was Evan Hunter, who had previously sold a short story for the director’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents television series and had written for “Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.” Although du Maurier apparently disliked the resulting script and film, which, among other changes to the source, relocated the drama from a Cornwall farm to seaside town of Bodega Bay, California, The Birds became a polished compendium of Hitchcock’s frequent preoccupations and a masterful illustration of his pronounced formal virtuosity. While he claimed no particular partiality for the author, The Birds would nevertheless be the third movie Hitchcock derived from a Daphne du Maurier text, following Jamaica Inn (1939) and Rebecca (1940), his first American film. ![]() ![]() To answer that question, for his first Universal Pictures release since 1943’s Shadow of a Doubt, Hitchcock moved away from the low-key, black and white ambiance and shocking terror of Psycho and opted for a Technicolor rendering of sweeping, enigmatic, effects-driven fright. Coming off the phenomenal success of Psycho, a groundbreaking film executed two years earlier, the legendary British filmmaker, by this point a mainstay in American popular culture, had somehow managed to one-up himself at seemingly every turn: “What will you do for an encore?”, Lew Wasserman supposedly asked Hitch after the triumph of his iconic 1960 horror classic, which garnered him his fifth and final Academy Award nomination for best director. To begin with a plainly intended pun, Alfred Hitchcock was soaring high when he set out to make The Birds in 1962.
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