Caught in the silly grasp of ‘The Giant Claw’

Monsters, by their very name, are supposed to be monstrous. Perhaps hideous like The Hideous Sun Demon, or beastly like Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Just throw an exclamation point on a film title like Them! or Tarantula! so we know something terrible is coming. Just give us a monster – it’s why we watch.

But there’s the chance if the monster lets us down through no fault of its own – bad design, poor effects or lame powers – it can taint our film experience. That means low-budget B-movie monsters – a favorite of mine – are at a disadvantage from a lack of resources. (I like to think filmmakers do the best with their creativity and budget, so I’ll forgive the shortcomings of the B-movie monsters.)

That brings us to The Giant Claw. I’m not talking about the grocery store arcade game where you lower the big claw into a pile of soft toys and nearly always come up empty, but the 1957 sci-fi film from the prolific duo of director Fred F. Sears and producer Sam Katzman (more on them later).

I only discovered the film in recent years while researching actress Mara Corday and was intrigued by the promise of the title. What was The Giant Claw? Was it a killer bear? (One of my phobias.) A predatory lion? A surprisingly fast-moving sloth?

No. It’s a big bird – just one big bird. And when you see it, please hold back the laughter. This creature isn’t monstrous, it’s goofy looking. As film historian and critic Leonard Maltin has been widely quoted as saying “Big bird is laughable.”

That’s true, but I still had an immediate soft spot in my B-movie heart for the film and its Goofy Claw title creature. I think of the film and smile because our big bird could be the homeliest monster on film, and I say that with affection. After the initial shock of meeting GC – we’ll call her GC for short since it works for both giant and goofy claw – I was rooting for her (we learn she is a girl bird later).

GC has a hilarious tuft of unruly hair sticking off the top of her oversized head, a snarled beak that makes it look like she’s trying too hard to be tough, and big bug eyes like you’ll find on children’s toys. I can’t help picturing GC as a huggable plush toy that I would buy right now if I could. She’s such a quirky, bizarre bird that she looks like she could use a hug (which we could do if she was a plush stuffed toy). We won’t talk about the odd cackling noise she makes – this poor bird can’t catch a break.

Despite the funny looking monster, this is a serious sci-fi film. There’s a narrator (the voice of our director Fred F. Sears) who pops in throughout to explain things, plenty of scientific mumbo-jumbo about atoms and anti-matter, and bold, exciting proclamations (“That bird is from a god-forsaken anti-matter galaxy!” “It was a flying battleship!”).

* * * * *

Pilot and engineer Mitch MacAfee (played by Jeff Morrow) spots
a UFO while on a radar test flight at the North Pole. The folks tracking him
from below – including mathematician Sally Caldwell (played by Mara Corday) –
don’t see anything on radar. Technically, Mitch didn’t see it either. It was
just a big blur that got too close. “Something like a cloud, but moving too
fast,” he says. Because of his persistence, three fighter jets are scrambled to
find his UFO, but all are tragically lost with no proof of anything in the air.
(The viewer sees what happened though.)

After that accident, the military isn’t happy with Mitch and sends him back to New York with Sally. Their small plane is attacked by a UFO (is it the same one?) and crashes in the Adirondacks. They’re helped by friendly French-Canadian farmer Pierre (Lou Merrill) who discovers something wrong near his barn and yells about la Carcagne, a legendary creature with the face of a wolf and body of a woman with wings who foreshadows death. What does this have to do with GC? Not much except to increase the tension as a terrified Pierre repeatedly yells “la Carcagne, la Carcagne.” He is afraid of something he doesn’t understand, much like what the world will soon be feeling.

Even after a smattering of reports about UFOs and lost planes, the military still has trouble believing Mitch since – and I will repeat – there’s nothing on the radar. (What is up with that?) The few who have seen it describe as a blur, just like Mitch, and that’s how it’s often presented to the viewer as a way to show its speed and those out of focus scenes are funnier than GC.

It takes an odd feather in plane wreckage for authorities to finally believe there’s something like a giant bird in the sky. Now they ask questions. How is the bird evading the radar? Why does the feather defy chemical analysis? What is this feathered nightmare on wings that can fly around the world faster than Superman leaving death and destruction in its path?

Clearly, it’s up to Mitch and the super smart Sally to answer those questions and save the world. But first, let’s talk about our two main characters.

Mitch is not the most likable guy. He’s apt to lose his cool
and often talks down to others including Sally who he calls “Mademoiselle
Mathematician.” That doesn’t stop him from hitting on her, even kissing her
while she’s sleeping on a plane in one creepy scene.

Where Morrow is dour and lacks the charm that could tame his arrogance, Corday infuses Sally with spunk and quiet confidence. She did the same with her characters in her two sci-fi films before this – Tarantula! (1955) and The Black Scorpion (1957). In this trio of films, she played a smart woman who could hold her own and doesn’t sit around waiting to be saved. She certainly won’t take anything from Mitch, even amusingly using his “Mademoiselle Mathematician” nickname against him. You’ll be rooting for her as she uses her smarts surrounded by men as she figures out how to deal with the big bird in the sky.

The film progresses as we expect. There are more sightings of big bird, attacks on trains and anything else that moves and people running in terror in recognizable spots around the world. With Sally’s math, Mitch devises a machine that could disrupt big bird’s shield. But, in good B-movie fashion, it’s never been tried before so there will be suspense of whether it will work as GC heads to New York City.

So you may be distracted by our big bird, but the film around it is everything we expect in a 1950s sci-fi B-movie and that makes it watchable.

In the end, I found the two females – Sally and GC – the most memorable part of The Giant Claw. Now if I could just get my stuffed plush movie collectible.

MORE ON THE FILM

Sears/Katzman combo. Director Fred F. Sears and producer
Sam Katzman worked on at least 18  movies
together – 14 of them over just two years. That includes the genre films Earth
vs. Flying Saucers (1956), the underappreciated and aptly title
werewolf film The Werewolf (1956) and The
Night the World Exploded (1957), plus the 1956 musicals Rock
Around the Clock and Don’t
Knock the Rock both starring Bill Haley and the Comets. In his career,
Sears directed 51 films but sadly died at age 44 in November 1957 before all
his films were released.

The look of The Giant Claw. Katzman originally planned to go all out and spend much of his budget on the creature and bring on stop-motion animation master Ray Harryhausen to create the flying wonder. Budget constraints nixed the idea. So instead of another Harryhausen stop-motion wonder, the big bird was created as a marionette – a puppet – as is obvious to viewers. It was a shock, however, to the cast and crew, who didn’t get a look at the creature until they saw the movie in a theater. Star Jeff Morrow has shared that he was watching the film in his hometown and was so embarrassed at the audience laughing at the bird that he left early.

– Toni
Ruberto for Classic Movie Hub

You
can read all of Toni’s Monsters and Matinees articles here.

Toni Ruberto, born and raised in Buffalo, N.Y., is an editor and writer at
The Buffalo News. She shares her love for classic movies in her blog, Watching Forever and is a member
and board chair of the Classic
Movie Blog Association. Toni was the president of the former Buffalo
chapter of TCM Backlot and led the offshoot group, Buffalo Classic Movie Buffs.
She is proud to have put Buffalo and its glorious old movie palaces in the
spotlight as the inaugural winner of the TCM in Your Hometown contest. You can
find Toni on Twitter at @toniruberto or on Bluesky at @watchingforever.bsky.social