Themes and plot devices in Hitchcock films Clift at a dinner party around the filming of "I Confess" (1953) to swallow a carafe of brandy, which caused the actor to pass out almost immediately. In "Torn Curtain" and "Topaz", brandy is defined more closely as cognac. Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) is offered a brandy by Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette), and after being attacked by the birds, drinks the brandy offered by Mitch (Rod Taylor). In "Rear Window", Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) is "just warming some brandy". In "Frenzy", Richard Blaney is sacked for supposedly stealing brandy, and can be seen in several sequences to be drinking brandy.
Alfred Hitchcock York when Hitchcock saw her, in October 1961, in an NBC television ad for Sego, a diet drink: "I signed her because she is a classic beauty. Movies don't have them any more. Grace Kelly was the last." He insisted, without explanation, that her first name be written in single quotation marks: 'Tippi'. In "The Birds", Melanie Daniels, a young socialite, meets lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) in a bird shop; Jessica Tandy plays his possessive mother. Hedren visits him in Bodega Bay (where "The Birds" was filmed) carrying a pair of lovebirds as a gift. Suddenly waves of birds