The Birds 1963 Part I

Today's SiscoVanilla at the Movies post is Alfred Hitchcock's classic The Birds (1963) which was loosely based on the story of the same name by British author Daphne Du Maurier.

In the movie, socialite Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) meets lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) in San Francisco and travels to his hometown of Bodega Bay where the birds in the town slowly start to act in a weird manner. What I love about this movie is that Hitchcock never tells us why the birds start to flip out and attack the townsfolk. Instead of today's horror and thrillers that spoon feed you every detail, Hitchcock leaves it to the audience to decide why the birds act the way they do in the movie. But enough about plot points, on to the liquor references.

While the scenes in the restaurant are chock full of liquor references that are relevant to 1963, I want to leave those for the next post since there is a whole lot of information to cover. For this post I wanted to focus on the scene after Melanie meets Mitch, his mother Lydia (Jessica Tandy) and his younger sister Cathy (Veronica Cartwright) for dinner. Daniels is renting a room at the home of schoolteacher Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette) and returns there somewhat despondent. When Hayworth asks Daniels if her reason for being down had to do with Lydia, she offers her some Brandy.

As the ladies talk about Mitch and his mother, the plot thickens when it is revealed that Annie was previously involved with Brenner. At this point both ladies have themselves some brandy to commiserate about Mitch and Lydia.

I look at the bottle that Annie pours from and immediately I note that it is a bottle of Hennessy Cognac.

For those of you who aren't knowledgeable in Cognac terminology and history, Cognac is Brandy but only those distilled in the Cognac region of France can be called a Cognac. If this particular spirit is distilled anywhere else in the world it is generically referred to as a Brandy. Now I partly cover the history of Hennessy in my post on The Boondock Saints (1999) which was dated January 28, 2014. But for this post, I find that I don't recognize the bottle that Annie pours from.

From my research it would seem that this particular bottle of Hennessy is known as the Hennessy 3 Star Cognac. Now I'm not sure whether this bottle is the 1940's bottling (left) or the 1950's bottling (right.) As you can see from the image of the two bottles that can be found on the Cognac Exchange website, the 1940's bottle doesn't have the one extra label on the bottom of the bottle that can be found on the 1950's bottling.

Now I don't know if that has to do with the market that the bottle was originally sold in or if all bottles had the bottom label. The bottle isn't seen fully in the movie with the exception of a rear label and a side view of the top label that has the three starts and the main front label.

Either way, the ladies are having themselves a quality spirit.

That Mitch must really be something as we see Annie drifting away with her smoke and her brandy as she listens to Melanie accept Mitch's offer to come to young Cathy's birthday party that Annie will also be attending.

And speaking of Mitch and the party, the next scene unfolds at the party and Mitch is with Melanie along the hills above from where the party is being held. Smooth as Mitch is, he has two cool looking stemless cocktail glasses and a small glass jar of what seems to be a pre-made cocktail.

A Martini perhaps?  We'll never know since right after this the proverbial shit hits the fan when the birds start to flip out and go after the party-goers. And with that we'll end today's post.

The next post will focus on a plethora of 1960's era spirits that can be found in The Tides Restaurant. Most of them would make Dan Draper of Mad Men fame proud to imbibe in.

Until Then Keep Drinking,
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