The fast-talking Hugh Wiberg, 60, a Pied Piper of sorts, takes great delight in elfish pursuits. How else to explain his fondness for growing and propagating huge pumpkins and hand-feeding wild birds from a pocketful of good-to-eat nuts and seeds? Wiberg, of Wilmington,...

by Camille Paglia. London: British Film Institute, 1998. 104 pp., illus. Paperback: $10.95. As a close look at his films reveal, Alfred Hitchcock was a more intuitive psychoanalyst than any of his biographers or critics. His films are laden with such primal...

More than 200 years ago, rats jumped ship for Rat Island.The muscular Norway rat climbed ashore on the rugged, uninhabited island in far southwestern Alaska in 1780 after a rodent-infested Japanese ship ran aground. It was the first time rats had made it to Alaska.Since...

A pale moon is projected onto the upper-left corner of the backdrop—a moon that turns into a huge eye that blinks and seems to weep. A huddle of dancers in brown suddenly spurt a single red rose. These and other startling effects somewhat animate Christopher...

[The Birds] is disappointing. The film has been made, it seems to me, on two mistaken assumptions. One is that a frightening film can be made in naturalistic color, and the other is that an attack by birds carries the emotional impact of a really horrific situation…. No doubt Hitchcock's reasoning was that the pastoral loveliness of Bodega Bay, rendered in soft color, would make us feel more attachment to the scene when it is abruptly threatened by thousands of attacking gulls and crows: so be...

Daphne du Maurier's 1952 acclaimed, nightmarish short story "The Birds" appealed greatly to Alfred Hitchcock, who turned it into a celebrated suspense thriller film released in 1963. While Hitchcock altered the plot and setting and used innovations in special effects and sounds in order for his audience to relate to the film, both versions successfully incorporate tension that continues to the end, leaving both reader and viewer with an unsettled feeling as to what will happen.

The short story and the movie of "The Birds" are extremely different. The book was written by Daphne DuMorier, while the movie was produced and written by Alfred Hitchcock. This alone is difference enough to demand attention. Like most movies that are based on books, the movie does not follow the book very much at all.