The Making of Hitchcock's the Birds

September 1, 2013
Fans of Alfred Hitchcock's films have long awaited a full-length look at the making of The Birds. Moral mixes original interviews and material drawn from previously published sources to take us through the creation, casting, filming, and release of The Birds, and as a chronicle of the production of the movie, his book has all the information fans will want, including plenty of behind-the-scenes stories. On the other hand, there are some hiccups. The prose is clumsy, and although there are interviews with some of the key participantsincluding stars Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedrenthere is an overreliance on familiar material from the Hitchcock archives and on material written by others (including Kyle Counts' lengthy article on the making of the film that appeared in Cinefantastique in 1980, from which Moral appears to have drawn great chunks of information). On the scale of making-of books about Hitchcock's movies, rank this one about midway between Raymond Foery's overly dry Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (2012) and Stephen Rebello's lively Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (1990).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)