Colors in Movies:
You shouldn't go by a movie to determine what appliance colors were available when.
The reason is that set designers often paint things to serve a purpose that has to do with the story, or with technical considerations. In Hitchcock's
Rope (1948), the kitchen of the apartment in which the story is set has a ceiling painted dark gray. You would
never see that in real life - at least not at that time. The reason? The kitchen set was a very small space that had to be very brightly lit; painting the set's ceiling the customary white would have caused glare. You only see the ceiling for a second, and it doesn't occur to most people that something's odd about it.
The green of the appliances in
The Birds was likely for a different reason - Hitchcock's use of color to relate characters. In the movie, Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) is torn between allegiance to his widowed mother Lydia (Jessica Tandy) and his new society girlfriend Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren). If you will recall, Tippi Hedren wears the same green suit nearly all the way through the movie*. Having the appliances in Lydia's kitchen - her domain - the same green links the two women together. If you'll notice, Lydia's pickup truck that she drives in such a panic after discovering the dead farmer is also green. The use of green like this relates the two women Mitch must care for.
It is entirely possible - though not certain - that the appliances in
The Birds were custom-painted for this purpose; this kind of thing is done fairly frequently. In case you're wondering what makes me think this, I write and lecture about Hitchcock.
Here's a screen shot of the range. If you'll notice, it's an even green, not shaded as the later factory-applied Avocado would have been. That's not to say it wasn't a factory color (I leave that to the appliance experts), but even if it was, it was chosen for Hitchcock's color relationships, which he did in his color movies all the time.
* The green suit itself had a purpose. In 1963, Tippi Hedren was a new actress to movie audiences, one who had never starred in a movie before. Green is an odd color for a blonde to wear; many blondes don't like it because they feel it makes them look sallow. By putting Hedren in that odd green, and keeping her in it for most of the movie, Hitchcock ensured that audiences would not become confused and "lose" her visually during the bird attacks and action sequences.
