Released in 1963, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds is the last great Hitchcock. Dismissed by serious critics (The New Republic’s Stanley Kauffmann called it Hitchcock’s worst thriller) and parodied by Mad magazine as “For the Birds,” The Birds becomes more of a wild trip with each viewing. Based on a story by Daphne du Maurier, this ecological cautionary tale chronicles an avian invasion of fine-feathered fiends terrorizing the formerly tranquil coastal hamlet of California’s Bodega Bay. Eyes are pecked out, victims slumped like scarecrows. Suspicion falls upon the cool socialite and glamour puss Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren, her film debut), whose arrival seems to have triggered the aerial assault forces. That she drove up from San Francisco in pursuit of Rod Taylor’s Mitch, presumably the only virile man for miles around, offers damning evidence to the local busybodies of a wicked hussy in their midst. Derided as a stiff mannequin by reviewers (billed as “Tipsy Headrinse” in Mad), Hedren’s screen presence in The Birds has acquired a patina of elegance, delicacy, and pathos that has aged beautifully. (Her performance in Marnie has undergone similar upward revision.) The Birds is the final Hitchcock boasting large-scale bravura set-pieces: a crow attack on the schoolhouse that sends the kids fleeing; Melanie trapped inside a telephone booth as birds try to beak their way in; the all-out, all-night siege of the house that leaves her bloodied, near catatonic, but still radiant, almost saintly—Hitchcock’s sacrificial offering to the movie gods. —James Wolcott