The Birds (1963 Alfredo Hitchcocko)

It's Halloween, almost. We wanted fried solid gold. OK, I posited Torn Curtain, which is fair - it's well overdue. But The Birds was more in keeping. It just gets better and better. The diner scene is just amazing, as various characters take the front of stage.  You could study that on its own. Those cameras - I mean, Hitch bothers to keep changing his camera positions - this isn't a quick TV style presentation. And the bird attacks are really well done, and no music...

So he completely deceives you into thinking you are watching some kind of romantic melodrama - well, actually, you are, the way it turns out, only there's a load of scary stuff as well, culminating in the attack on Tippi Hedren (great performance) at the end, which is savagely well edited - the equivalent of the Psycho shower scene. Then, when she's shell-shocked, and sees the gathered birds and says, 'No'... And before that, she comes out of her trance and fights away the birds...

Evan Hunter wrote it. He was Ed McBain, and had written and screenwritten Strangers When we Meet, as well as a AH Presents called 'Appointment at Eleven'. 'He would pick holes in the story so far, and say 'Why does she do this? Why does she do that?.."

There's a great shot towards the end of four crows lined up, like the Sicilian women commenting on the action.

Great acting. Maybe Rod Taylor's best performance. Tippi Hedren is great - she may have been tortured by Hitch but she agreed to be in his next film... Suzanne Pleshette is Annie, Jessica Tandy is the mother. Fabulous stuff.

Melanie's driving a 1954 Aston Martin DB2/4.

The two shots of the broken glasses followed by blood-soaked face seem to me to be a direct quotation of Battleship Potemkin.