The Giant Claw (

1957

)

There’s no one set path that a movie must follow to succeed. Brilliant films from the same era and genre all shine in their own unique manner. The Thing from Another World (1951) is carried by snappy dialogue and its can-do attitude, while Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) succeeds because of the way it makes its alien menace simultaneously cosmic and personal; and those two movies are both about killer alien vegetables! The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) is a psychological thriller about a man being literally swallowed whole by the domestic space he inhabitants, and Godzilla (1954) is a sobering metaphor for atomic destruction. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and The Black Scorpion (1957) may not have a compelling intellectual core but they can boast some of the most enduringly impressive special effects of the era. Then there are films like today’s movie which endear themselves to their audience through sheer silliness and unbridled stupidity.

Our story begins at a remote Arctic radar installation part of the DEW line that long-time readers might remember from my review of The Deadly Mantis (1957). Don’t worry, we’re not going to start today’s film off with a fifteen-minute advertisement for the necessity of building and maintaining a string of radar installations near the North Pole like the aforementioned film.  The Giant Claw has way too much insane shit to cram into its runtime to be wasting precious minutes with a newsreel. There is, however, a voiceover narrator who introduces us to the major characters and explains in worrying detail what they’re doing. Just as I was beginning to wonder if the film was pulling a The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961), and using copious narration to disguise the fact that they screwed up recording audio, the characters open their mouths and the narrator promptly vanishes.

So, we’re left with our two leads, Mitch MacAfee an electrical engineer who’s currently piloting a jet plane around the Arctic Circle and mathematician Sally Caldwell whose back at base calibrating the new radar equipment. The two go about their business with the usual flirtatious banter. It’s worth noting that the romantic subplot in this film is nowhere near as annoying as it usually is. Maybe it’s because the attraction between Mitch and Sally is a good deal more physical and explicit than was the norm for this era. In the opening scene, for instance, a frustrated Sally mentions how Mitch needs a spanking, to which Mitch enthusiastically agrees. It doesn’t hurt that Sally is played by future playboy playmate Mara Corday and is even lovelier here than she was in The Black Scorpion (1957).

Things proceed as normal with their appointed task until Mitch spots a UFO the size of a battleship streaking through the skies. Mitch calls it in and gets back to base ASAP, however when he returns he’s greeted by the base’s fuming CO, Major Bergen. The Major thinks MacAfee made the whole thing up for attention. He’s outraged not just because MacAfee had him scrambling the jet-fighters for a wild goose chase but worse yet one of his planes has gone missing. How it doesn’t occur to the Major that maybe, MacAfee actually saw a UFO, and this same UFO is what downed his missing interceptor is beyond me, but it does serve as evidence for one of The Giant Claw’s most unique aspects: It’s a startlingly negative depiction of the American military.

Living in the 21st century we’re accustomed to depictions of American military idiocy on the silver screen. Starting with films like Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), where the US high command is depicted as a gaggle of hair-brained idiots. General Buck Turgidson would remain the most absurd clown in the cinematic military for at least a generation, but he soon found himself competing with comparable figures in MASH (1970) and Stripes (1981). Other films opt to depict the American military in a different, albeit no less negative fashion, making them into psychos rather than clowns. Take your pick of any of the ultra-violent Vietnam movies like Platoon (1986), Apocalypse Now (1979), or The Deer Hunter (1978) for examples of this approach. I each it’s not hard to find American soldiers who are little better than sadistic monsters in uniform.

Yet in the 1950s, opinion of the American military was still coasting on the prestige accrued during WWII. When you watch a film from this era you can usually read the presence of epaulets and fruit salad as evidence that the character in question was a solid and reliable figure. Soldiers in 1950s sci-fi/horror movies may not always have the right solution but they could be counted on to be courageous in the face of danger and reasonable when they found themselves in novel situations. Sure, occasionally you would get odd exceptions like the general Beginning of the End (1957) who gave Dr. Wainwright a dressing down only to be given immediate evidence that Wainwright knew more than he did about the situation or the military commanders in The Magnetic Monster (1953) that need to have basic facts patiently explained to them by the A-Men of OSI. However, in both these cases, military stupidity is merely the product of momentary ignorance, and the soldiers in question are quickly and easily corrected. Genuinely subversive depictions of the military were screened off by distance in time and nationality like the incompetent high command of the WWI French army in Paths of Glory (1957).

In such context, the military men we see in The Giant Claw, like the idiotic major who somehow can’t put two and two together are about as run-of-the-mill as finding a pink elephant in your shower. Not only does he persist in his error beyond any reasonable limit, but his last lines in the movie are him telling MacAfee that he’s lucky he’s a civilian otherwise he’d have him court-martialed. The major is nothing compared with his superiors though. When the UFO keeps downing planes, news works its way up the chain of command to General Van Buskirk (who sounds like he should be a guest character on Hogan’s Heroes). Buskirk promptly drags MacAfee into his office and blames MacAfree (“…since you started this crazy nightmare…”), as if things would have turned out any different if MacAfee hadn’t spotted the UFO. Then when the army obtains some images of the UFO from a weather balloon, which shows the characters (but not the audience as they got to see this thing a scene earlier), that the UFO does exist and it’s really a skyscraper-sized buzzard, Buskirk’s big plan is to simply classify everything. Naturally, this plan of effectively pretending the monster doesn’t exist does not prevent it from continuing to terrorize the skies, destroying planes, terrorizing French-Canadian farmers, and devouring a group of teenage hot-rodders that seem to have wandered in from another movie.

We’re going to have to talk about the special effects in this movie, because even in a decade that could boast such hilariously incompetent visual effects as The Beginning of the End (1957) and the Giant Gila Monster (1959), the ones in The Giant Claw still stand out as something special. Lead actor Jeff Morrow, who had not seen the special effects before attending a screening of the film in person, was so embarrassed by the bird onscreen and the audience’s incessant snickering whenever it turned up, that he left the auditorium early and waited for his family in the car. This was not Morrow’s first rodeo with cheap and amusing special effects either, he had previously starred in Kronos (1957) and The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), but while neither of these films look particularly good seventy years later, The Giant Claw was on another level altogether.

Unlike the more impressive films of the era, like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), or The Black Scorpion (1957), the monster here is not stop-motion. Nor does The Giant Claw rely on the Godzilla (1954) approach and simply put a stuntman in a rubber suit and have him stomp around a scale model. Instead, The Giant Claw uses a puppet as its main antagonist. Already, that’s an obvious problem as even the most sophisticated puppet cannot hope to match the range of motion of a rubber suit or a Claymation model. Yet this particular puppet is something else entirely. Rather than render the bird like an eagle or a hawk, or some other bird of prey that had the remotest possibility of being considered intimidating the special effects artists made it a buzzard. Worst still, they made it downright adorable! I assume that these puppeteers previously worked on children’s television because the puppet they made for this horror movie looks like it could burst into a playful song at any moment. Don’t get me started on the creature’s articulated nostrils which give it the weird impression that its beak is just a massive nose. Of course, it seems like all the limit funds went into the puppet as well, because all the scale model scenery and objects the buzzard interacts with are of the poorest quality.

Originally producer Sam Katzman and director Fred F. Sears had planned to hire Ray Harryhausen, who they’d collaborated with before on Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers (1956). However, Harryhausen was never a cheap option, and Katzman wanted the film made on a shoestring, so he outsourced the visual effects work to a no-name team based out of Mexico City. So, instead of industry-leading stop-motion animation, The Giant Claw was forced to make do with a shoddy marionette. There is no way of overstating how massive a downgrade this decision really is, it’s like calling in a little leaguer to relieve your starting pitcher in an MLB game, or subbing in Uwe Boll for Peter Jackson on The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). Sure, The Giant Claw would never have been a particularly good movie even with Harryhausen onboard. But at least it would have been a special effects extravaganza with a dull plot bolted onto it, something like It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955).

Of course, the buzzard monster of the Giant Claw is strange in another way too. Normally, the giant monsters of Western horror films were just overgrown animals. The ants from Them! (1954) were just colossal ants, the octopus from It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) was just an octopus scaled up to the size of an aircraft carrier, and the shrews from The Killer Shrews (1959) were just shrews the size of Dobermans (or whatever breed of large dogs they got to wear the ridiculous costumes). While these films certainly informed the Japanese Kaiju movies (The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) in particular was an influence on Godzilla (1954)), they differed considerably in terms of the powers those giant monsters wielded. Western movies did not give their giant monsters atomic breath, or the ability to generate magnetic fields on the fly. However, The Giant Claw is the exception to the rule because the buzzard is protected by an anti-matter shield, that renders all conventional attacks, even atomic weapons, ineffective. Even more amazing, the monster can lower this field at will, allowing its beak and talons to connect with its targets. Jeeze, next to that breathing fire seems downright mundane! If the humans are going to have a hope in hell of stopping this thing the military’s gonna have to pull its thumbs out of its ass and MacAfee will need to dream up some sort of whiz-bang gizmo to break the monster’s shield. If you’ve watched a 190s sci-fi monster movie before I bet you can see how the last act plays out already.

Of course, I would be remiss to pass over an opportunity to use a shitty sci-fi film to examine the culture and history of postwar America, it is after all this site’s raison d'etre. Moreover, The Giant Claw gives us an unusually easy in thanks to the opening narration, where the narrator mentions that “Once the world was big, that no man in his lifetime could circle it. Through the centuries, science has made man's lifetime bigger and the world smaller. Now the furthest corner of the earth is as close as a push-button.” This is a rather grim way to begin your movie about a giant alien turkey vulture. Indeed, it seems wildly out of place given how goofy everything else in the film comes across.

Yet the stupid bird puppet does accurately reflect some real-world fears. In 1957, the Soviets launched their first ICBM (along with their first satellite Sputnik), and the popular imagination of how a potential war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact would be fought began to shift dramatically. Previously it had been assumed that atomic weapons would be delivered by bombers, with short-range missiles like the V2 being a last-ditch option in the event of contested skies. Of course, the thing about bombers is that they can be shot down, either by AA flak or interceptors, and they can be especially vulnerable if detected early enough. This was the logic behind the construction of the Pinetree, Mid-Canada, and DEW lines. The American government wanted an early warning system so that, in the event of a massive Soviet air attack over the North Pole, there would be enough warning to prepare air defenses. Yet missiles, being far smaller and far faster than bombers, are almost impossible to shoot down (modern anti-ballistic missiles were a long way off in 1957), so this vast network of defenses would only be good for informing Americans ahead of time that they were about to meet their maker.

In such context, the giant bird with its immunity to conventional weapons and inability to be detected by radar begins to make a lot more sense. Indeed, it also explains why the characters in this film make such a big show over how nothing airborne can avoid detection by radar (Stealth aircraft were at least conceptually possible as evidenced by things like the Russian spy plane in Gog (1954)). Now, the giant bird here is certainly not a 1:1 allegory for ICBMs carrying atomic warheads. Atomic bombs don’t, as a rule, lay gigantic eggs, or go out of their way to terrorize French farmers. Yet the specific powers and abilities of this colossal bird, as well as its tendency to casually fly over the most sophisticated radar defense systems in the world suggests that the filmmakers were drawing from these emerging real-world fears. Even the dumbest films can have underlying political and historical messages.