Clerk: If you ever want to buy a book...?Marlowe:Ben-Hur, 1860?Clerk: With duplications? So long.Marlowe: So long, pal.BackgroundThe Birds(1963) is a modern Hitchcock thriller/masterpiece, his first film with Universal Studios.He couldn""t find long-term acting jobs, and was continually aggravating his long-suffering alent agent George Fields (director Sydney Pollack).The fear was that in 2,000 years, the apes would all but exterminate the human race from Earth.Armando vainly argued that his chimpanzee was legally certified that it was born a month before the talking apes arrived.They were valuable to him, because they would be radioactively "lethal" to anyone from the planet, hence disastrous to Superman.