Tony Lee Moral

A divisive read.

First, this book is - on many subjects - exhaustive. Moral doesn't just look at how the crew caught the birds, he looks at the various technical problems they created and the industry solutions and ideas to solve said problems. You feel that whenever Moral spoke with someone (people remembering 50-year-old events) he felt inclined to include every fact and word they said. He's clearly got a passion for Hitchcock and this film, and it shows. At the same time, sometimes he's frustratingly marginal - each of the actors is introduced with thoughts on the audition process and why they took the role, but their personal biographies are frustratingly slim.

Of all Hitch's films, "The Birds" is one of the most deserving of biographies, and I'm glad that Moral is going from conception to legacy, leaving no stone unturned. My issues are threefold. First, by straightforwardly accepting the word of all the participants (and, in some cases, facts from older interviews), he provides us with a rather bland palette. Reminiscences after 50 years are occasionally opinionated (cf Tippi Hedren's memories of Hitch) but more often than not, they mellow. A lot of the time, an interviewee recalls an event in rather wise, unconcerned prose. While this allows each person to be heard without any biased filter, it also removes much of the interest from some of these memories, particularly the unedited ones! (The entire section on Daphne Du Maurier's thoughts on Hitchcock is dead boring - there's very little personal insight, and we just get some vague recollections about how she at first didn't know who was buying her book... and then she knew. Wow.) Fair enough, you interview someone and it's polite to leave them in the book. Yet when Bodega Bay resident Glenice gets an entire paragraph about how she got to have lunch with Jessica Tandy and Suzanne Pleshette, you wonder if she couldn't have just had a footnote mention for the one contribution of the paragraph - that the extras wore their own clothes!

Second, Moral's prose is astonishingly workmanlike. It often reads like a highschooler's memories of a school trip: very matter-of-fact and observational, true, but rarely rising above adequate. This in itself wouldn't be a problem, but it leads me to the third point about this book: it may be touted as an analysis, but it's more of a production diary. There are very few opinions (it comes as quite a shock when Evan Hunter actually admits he sometimes got pissed off at Hitch for being a social busybody) and Moral seems to forego analysis at every turn, mostly opting for documentation. Sadly, the layout of the book is not styled like a diary (sections are structured in order of discipline, not chronology: "writing", "casting", "filming" etc). The two approaches don't work. Because it's structured like an analysis, we follow all the writing facts before we reach those chronological points during filming (particularly saddening in this case because it was a rare example of Hitch improvising on set - to have these experiences laid out in chronological order would've been phenomenal!). And because it's written like a report, you really have to appreciate minutiae to enjoy this volume.

Things pick up a fair bit once we reach the studio filming section, as Moral's tendency for writing a production journal actually gels with the subject matter. He examines most of the big scenes throughout the film, detailing the unique ways Hitchcock and the crew found to work with this most unusual script. Some of the interviewees drop their guard a bit to at least suggest the heresy that Hitchcock wasn't a perfect individual. It's an interesting section of the book and quite enjoyable (if still reasonably pedestrian in style).

I hope I don't sound too cruel, as Moral's depth of research really shines through (he could perhaps have used another proofread - embarrassingly, neither Hitchcock nor Tippi Hedren appear in the index). And I look forward to reading his "Marnie" journal, because that film surely created far more controversies, so perhaps those will invigorate his prose. As a Hitchcock fan (and one whose favourite of his films is "The Birds"), I'm glad to have this volume on my shelf. This is certainly an adequate book in the level of information it provides, it just does so in an unfortunately dull fashion.… (plus d'informations)