The Making of Hitchcock’s The Birds  Tony Lee Moral

It’s remarkable that one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most highly regarded masterpieces, The Birds, was considered by many at its first appearance as something of a misfire. The film itself seems richer with the years, and it is arguably the cinema’s most striking vision of Armageddon. Anyone with the vaguest interest in the film (or the director himself) will find Tony Lee Moral’s loving and exhaustive study of the making of the film utterly fascinating. There is not an aspect of the creation of Hitchcock’s third Daphne du Maurier adaptation which is not examined in intriguing forensic detail — from writing to casting — and in an era when the presentation of Hitchcock himself on the screen has a distinctly unsympathetic tone, it’s interesting to note that Moral is not concerned with such demystifications, and The Making of Hitchcock’s The Birds (as with the writer’s similar tome on the making of Marnie) is essentially a celebration of genius.

The Making of Hitchcock’s The Birds by Tony Lee Moral is published by Kamera Books