Movies from the 1960s

The Birds (1963)

In The Birds, right after stopping in the street to respond to a boy’s wolf whistle, Tippi Hedren goes into a pet store. As she enters, out comes Alfred Hitchcock, along with two dogs.

The dogs were apparently Hitchcock’s own, although for director’s pets, they weren’t particularly well trained. Despite their fleeting screen time, one of the dogs still finds time to stop and look right at the camera:

The Birds (1963)

Near the beginning of The Birds, when Tippi Hedren is walking down the street (having just passed the San Francisco poster), she turns to acknowledge a wolf-whistle from a passing boy. This is an in-joke.

Hitchcock had first seen Hedren in a commercial for Sego diet drink made by Pet Milk. There was a shot in that commercial where she turns and smiles in response to a wolf whistle, and Hitchcock decided to reference it here.

The Birds (1963)

After a couple of establishing shots showing Tippi Hedren walking through San Francisco’s Union Square in The Birds, the actress walks behind a large poster advertising the city (and clueing in anybody who still doesn’t know where the scene is set). The poster serves another purpose, however: it hides a cut.

Before Tippi Hedren walks behind the poster (above), we’re there in San Francisco. By the time she emerges (below), we’ve moved to a studio set, including the exterior of the pet shop.

It’s nicely done, but the lighting is a dead giveaway. You can’t really see it in these stills, but when you watch the scene, look at the shadows on the ground: they’re hardly visible in the location shooting in natural light, but on set, the actors cast multiple, well defined shadows.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

About twenty-five minutes into Kubrick’s 2001, during the gravity-free shuttle ride, there’s a great special effect: a loose pen, floating through the air.

Apparently it took them a long time to get this shot right: any kind of messing about with bits of wire just wouldn’t have looked realistic. The effect was finally achieved by sticking the pen to a large sheet of glass, and slowly rotating the glass in front of the camera.

When you’re watching the movie, if you look carefully, you can see the very slight resistance when the airline hostess picks the pen ‘out of the air’, and it detaches from the glass.

If.... (1968)

When Malcolm McDowell was preparing for his role in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, he wasn’t sure how to play the character. He turned for advice to Lindsay Anderson, the director of If…., which had launched McDowell’s film career a couple of years earlier.

Anderson reminded him of a close-up from If…., in which McDowell’s character Mick Travis walks into a gym where he’s due to be beaten. It’s a great shot, perfectly capturing the combination of defiance and vulnerability that make up Travis.

“That’s how you play Alex,” Lindsay Anderson told McDowell. And so he did.

(According to McDowell’s comments on the dommentary track for If…., he never told Kubrick that he’d taken the character direction from another director…)