The Giant Claw

Dir: Fred F. Sears

1957

*/*****

Jeff Morrow is great in 1957 sci-fi monster film The Giant Claw. He plays the archetypal expert/hero who experiences an ‘event’, is integral to the study of such ‘event’ and is responsible for saving the day and eradicating the cause of said ‘event’. The ‘event’ in this particular scenario involves a ferocious hawk-like creature of giant proportions. Morrow plays a civil aeronautical engineer who, while on a routine radar test flight near the North Pole, spots an unidentified flying object fly overhead ‘the size of a battleship’. He reports it and three jet fighters scramble to pursue and identify the object but only two of the jets return. He is then accused of wasting time and resources and is indirectly blamed for the lost pilot, thanks to his ‘hoax’. Then for about half an hour of the film he tries to defend himself while every other character mocks his ‘the size of a battleship claim’. Unfortunately, all this does is mock the film’s own script, which is excruciatingly bad, but delivered with class. Soon enough more people fall foul of the giant…fowl, and Morrow’s Mitch MacAfee is believed. He isn’t a giant bird expert, knows nothing about antimatter (the only logical explanation) and has no experience of aviation battle but somehow it’s down to him to save the day. He’s believable; as is as mathematician Sally Caldwell, Edgar Barrier as physics and astronomical wiz Dr. Noymann, Morris Ankrum as General Considine and Robert Shayne as General Van Buskirk. The plot is as silly as these big monster films typically were but it was all done relatively well for its time and with what technology was available in 1957. The stuff about the giant bird coming from outta space and being protected from antimatter is all silly fun, indeed, these old b-movies would be worse if they didn’t play around with nonsensical sci-fi nonsense. Everyone is on fine form, it was probably never going to be the best b-movie/sci-fi/monster movie but all those involved were positive. Morrow said years later that neither he, nor anyone else working on the shoot had actually seen the monster until the film’s premiere. They were told it was state of the art stuff that would be created post-production, and if the poster was anything to go by the audience were in for a real spectacle. The truth is producer Sam Katzman had originally asked the great Ray Harryhausen to produce the creature with his legendary stop-motion animation techniques but budget constraints put stop to that idea rather quickly. Without too much debate, he hired a low-budget special effects studio in Mexico who made the flying monster into a poorly crafted marionette on wires. The finished film was a laughing stock and every time the ‘Giant Claw’ appeared on screen the audience would erupt in laughter. Morrow admitted that he was so embarrassed that he slipped out of the premiere and went straight home and started drinking heavily, worried that someone might recognise him. The rest is history. The monster does spoil the good work of the rest of the film but to be honest, the film is now legendary because of the terrible but brilliant special effects. Watching the Giant Claw picking off a group of parachuting passengers one by one is one of the greatest scenes in the history of cinema. It’s awful but awfully good at the same time. I’m not sure any b-movie was as bad/brilliant until Shark Attack 3 came along many decades later. I think it is hilarious that no one, not even the poster designers, were shown the creature before the film was released. It could never happen nowadays, so there is something extremely charming about the whole mess. I honestly don’t think I would have enjoyed it as much had the effects actually been of the industry standard at the time and I don’t think The Giant Claw would have reached the legendary status that it now holds either, I mean, the film double billed with The Night the World Exploded which had better effects and who remembers that?