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Last week's Movie Quiz winners

(By the way, the admonishment at the bottom of the poster isn't as obvious and stupid as it might appear-- odd as it may seem today, even in the '60s, people routinely walked into the theater whenever they showed up. A friend of mine actually grew up believing that you started watching movies in the middle, then stayed after it was over to see how it started!)

Last week's quiz movie in question was, of course, The Birds (1963), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. There were lots of personal recollections from winners and, for a change, this is one Hitch flick that people don't remember all that fondly. "This is definitely one of those films that scared the hell out of me as a kid but now has lost most all of its punch." "This film has not aged well. I was in [a] Hitchcock Film class this past Spring and the class would erupt in laughter at parts that were never meant to be funny. The scene with the crows on the jungle gym has been done so many times since this film came out it's become a worn out cliche." "I never really cared for this film. I’m not too afraid of seagulls."

This was also the film that introduced Melanie Griffith's mother, aka Tippi Hedren, to the world. Say what you will about her acting, she was a real trooper, putting up with filming situations worse than . . . well, a horror movie. The climactic scene where she's attacked in the attic took a week to shoot. According to Hedren: "I was on the floor, on the ground by the door, and they had tied bands around my body before I put the dress on, with little thin elastics, and through the holes of the dress, they pulled the strings through, and then they loosely tied the leg of the bird to my body. And one of them was sitting here and it jumped up at my face and scratched my eye and I just said, 'That's enough'."

But even the worst of her feathered costars were still easier for her to work with than her director and mentor. According to Hitch biographer Donald Spoto (The Dark Side of Genius), it wasn't until their next film together (and their last), Marnie that the director let his leading lady know exactly how he felt about her. Her reaction (and I'm paraphrasing): "Yuck!" Again, Ms. Hedren: "It was very, very difficult for me. [...] He wanted me to be beholden to him for making me a star. Yes, he was sexually obsessed with me. It was awful but what could I do? There's no doubt about it, Hitch did have a very weird attitude towards women, perhaps because of his very strange childhood." (They didn't speak for the rest of Marnie, and forever after, Hitchcock only referred to her as "that woman.")

It was a good turnout of winners this week, so congratulations and an economy-size helping of gull guano to the following: Vince Tuss, Wayne Palmer, Shannon.Blatherwick, Michael Kelly, Bob Redwing, Mark Gisleson, Donald Greene, Lisa Young, Song-Un Lee, Thomas Miller, Dennis Lynch, Joe Rosenberg, Corey Anderson, E. Yarber, Kevin Musolini, Michael Arnold, Bill Hearne, mick, Dean E. Carlson, John Reinan, Michael Mattson, and Nick Rupar.

Posted by Steve Monaco at September 30, 2007 11:02 PM

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