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.
The Birds (film) as they carefully escort Melanie to the car past a mass of birds nearby. The car slowly makes its way through a landscape in which thousands of birds are ominously perching. Residents in the town of Capitola, California awoke on August 18, 1961 to find sooty shearwaters slamming into their rooftops and their streets covered with dead birds. News reports suggested domoic acid poisoning (amnesic shellfish poisoning) as the cause. According to the local "Santa Cruz Sentinel", Alfred Hitchcock requested news copy in 1961 to use as "research material for his latest thriller". At the end of the same month,