..To escape the flesh-eating birds that made he sky almost as black as the beach....The birds hovered and swooped o attack and hovered and swooped to attack.They were diving down on the sea turtles, turning them over to expose their soft undersides, earing their undersides open and rending and eating their flesh.The film was nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Actress (Celia Johnson), Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay (Noel Coward, David Lean, and Anthony Havelock-Allan), and won the major prize at the first Cannes Film Festival.Polanski opted o use a bleak ending rather than the more hopeful finale in the original screenplay, presumably because of his life""s tragedies.He immediately recalled Carlotta""s popularity as an actress among the burly miners: "Your picture was on the wall of every mining shack up there in Montana, right alongside of John L.The entrance to the living quarters of the crazed, oothless and eccentric servant Angu Ayah (May Hallatt) was decorated with two vertical strips of fabric billowing and flapping in the wind as she pranced out when summoned by an invisible chorus of inner voices (concubine-music from the past?).