Cardboard Science: But he had glimpsed a dark swooping patch overhead, lighted by gleams of fox-fire redder than the aurora glow, and had heard a flutter of thick wings and smelled a whiff of corruption tainting the clean air

THE GIANT CLAW

1957

Directed by Fred F. Sears

Written by Samuel Newman and Paul Gangelin

Spoilers: high

The overwhelming consensus on The Giant Claw, fairly infamous by the standards of 1950s science fiction, is that it is heinously bad, and it's bad because of its incredibly shoddy special effects.  It was produced by Columbia's B-picture unit under Sam Katzman (which by 1954 was sourcing many of its films from Katzman's own company, Clover), during the curiously brief period in which he was interested in sci-fi to any significant degree; for while Katzman was the producer of over 200 films and serials, the vast majority of which were low-to-mid-budget and what you'd call "exploitation," maybe not as many as ten fit neatly into the category of "science fiction," and the vast majority of those were made in only three years, 1955-1957.  Of course, because of the way film history works, they're probably what he's best-known for today.  (Arrow Video has released a nice-looking—and ridiculously-priced—set of blu-rays of Katzman's sci-fi productions, under the banner of Cold War Creatures, yet they seem rather more reluctant to put out, say, a jungle adventure set called Johnny Weissmuller vs. Sub-Saharan Africa, or even an Early William Castle Grab-Bag or So You Kids Like "Rock" Music, Huh?)  Accordingly, perhaps the two single most important films in his whole filmography, and certainly the two that are most important for our story besides The Giant Claw itself, are 1955's It Came From Beneath the Sea and 1956's Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, names you likely recognize because those were the films that confirmed the marketability of Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion animation after it had made The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms a hit, and that also introduced Harryhausen to Charles Schneer, who'd been taking his orders from Katzman before following the same path to become Harryhausen's own indispensable independent producer.

Thus probably the other most important movie for our story is 1957's 20,000,000 Million Miles To Earth, Harryhausen's fifth feature film, because as the legend has it, The Giant Claw, obviously concerning a giant monster, specifically a bird the size of a battleship (italics very much in the original, but then italics would be appropriate for a downright huge fraction of its dialogue), was developed with Harryhausen stop-motion effects in mind; unfortunately, by the time the movie was actually made he and Schneer were out the door and working for themselves.  (Like the tale-teller in the film's literary basis—oh, yes, it has one, after a fashion—I feel it necessary to remind you more than once that this is all supposition.  Yet it is supposition of sufficient commonplaceness that Wikipedia editors don't even fight about putting it in the film's article, despite there being no source to prove it.  Whereas to the best of my knowledge, Harryhausen never mentioned the movie at all.)  Who knows if Katzman was sent scrambling, or if he was hoodwinked, or if the attribution of the outsourced effects to "the model-maker in Mexico City" even identifies any real person (the claim surely has the scent of chauvinism), but somebody must have done it, and those who were involved in the production have ever since been adamant that they had never so much as glimpsed the monster before principal photography was over, only told by Katzman, with the puffery typical of his vocation, that it was gonna look awesome.  Lead actor Jeff Morrow's reported going out to see the picture, excited to finally witness what it was he'd been acting against during the film's brief shoot, only to be so mortified by the sight and the audience laughter it provoked that he melted down into his seat, praying that nobody would recognize him, his spirits buoyed only after the end, when he overheard someone mention that it was pretty good, and specifically pretty well-acted, except for the monster.

This anonymous theatergoer's hearsay review has remained the ironclad take on The Giant Claw ever since, and I'm sorry, but I think everyone is wrong: it's bad for entirely different reasons.  That is, if it's bad at all, but if the monster itself, and the special effects employed to bring it to life, are the intertwined reasons it's not held to be merely bad-bad, but a so-bad-it's-good cult classic, then our very first priority must be to take on that monster, and here's where we stand: I think the big bird rules.

Harryhausen might be the gold standard of 1950s special effects, but it's simply not that valid a comparison: Harryhausen made many cool flying creatures, yes, but he worked in stop-motion animation, and this isn't stop-motion animation, it's live-action puppetry.  They're two different media, of course not wholly different, but besides the general preference which one may have for animated monsters in one's monster movies, at that point you're only being a little fairer than if you asked why Harryhausen stop-motion animation isn't as seamlessly fluid as Disney cel animation.  The techniques have different strengths and different weaknesses (to state the obvious, regardless of any other quality, a live-action puppet does move with seamless fluidity), though at the same time I realize we're not dealing with world-class puppetry, either.  Still, it's just not that bad, for what it is (a puppet in a B-movie, and because it's a bird, one that often must go unconcealed by either the frame or by occluding objects).  Given its reputation as some kind of no-effort piece of trash (the urban myth also describes it as having "cost $50"), it's surprisingly robustly-articulated, with the evident potential for motion, if not all at the same time—I mean, obviously—in its eyes, jaw, neck, wings, and claws, though it doesn't really make expressions.  (A big miss of course, because birds are widely known for their facial expressivity.)  An enormous amount of articulation was perhaps not terribly requisite, then: it does, after all, spend most of its time conserving movement—soaring, or roosting, and swooping down in shallowly-angled dives—and it's a little stilted, but to the extent you ought to expect a monster puppet in 1957 to be, and we certainly get to see it do stuff.  That poster image of it converting the Empire State Building into a nest is no marketing department bullshit, it's very much beheld in the movie; it carries off a car filled with reckless teens who disrespectfully call our science hero "daddio" while thumbing their nose at the military blackout; and a whole damn train dangles from its taloned clutches as if a scavenger had merely flown off with delicious sausages, an image that achieves, and I believe is attempting to achieve, the flavor of bleak absurdism.  The scale of the bird, albeit a touch inconsistent, nevertheless makes it all times much bigger than your usual American movie monster: I'm not the first person to declare it a genuine American kaiju, and that's a useful way of approaching it for several reasons.  It is, in fact, "more" of a puppet than Mothra was—I'm fairly certain, anyway, that the original imago puppet used in Mothra has no more than two points of articulation, one on each wing, and they go "up" and "down"—and you don't see too many people slagging on Mothra.

I mean, fine, we're not talking Alf, even if it kind of looks like Alf.

I suspect it's less due to the technique than the design, and I don't know what to tell you, except I wouldn't trade its design for anything.  I do get it, I guess: it's powerfully ugly.  Frankly, this is what I find so great about it, its starting place being a vulture, but the most grotesque caricature of a vulture imaginable with its snakelike neck and wrinkled bald upper body and scraggly, somehow filthy-looking feathers—there's even a little anthropoid in it to make it just disgustingly wrong, notably that nose more like a snout than a beak, but also the presence of teeth (possibly prompting the poster's "WINGED MONSTER FROM 17,000,000 B.C.!" description, which is just completely contradicted by the movie even if I kind of wish it weren't, but close enough to birds with teeth, which bit the bullet during the K-Pg extinction with so many other theropod lineages), and bristly feathers that look like nose hairs that have gone untrimmed since 17,000,000 B.C.—and it's topped off with that glorious unkempt mohawk that, in combination with its implausibly giant eyes, make it look not just like a monster, but an expression of legitimate madness.  Hell yeah, it's ugly, and it has more personality in its ugliness than almost any monster of its era.

The story is basically The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, though that's true of a number of things, and it's a sturdy-enough template, even if it begins departing from it around the three-fifths mark in ways that are going to get really wonky.  In truth, the so-bad-it's-good reputation does have some other contributing factors, such as some of the most asinine stentorian narration to kick off our plot, situating us amidst weapons scientists and military technicians in the Arctic (not straying far from that template at all so far, are we?) whilst intoning lines like "an electronics engineer, a radar officer, a mathematician and systems analyst, a radar operator, a couple of plotters.  People doing a job.  Well.  Efficiently.  Serious.  Having fun.  Doing a job.  Situation?  Normal.  For the moment," with exactly that cadence, and I should mention I was positively certain, like I would've bet my life on it, that this featured on an MST3K episode.  (I was probably thinking of The Deadly Mantis, and how could I ever have gotten them confused?)  This is charming in its fashion—moreso when you know this narrator is this movie's (and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers') own director, prolific B-filmmaker Fred F. Sears, less so when you know that he appears to have resorted to this in every damn sci-fi movie he ever made, including Giant Claw's own double feature-mate, The Night the World Exploded—though either way, the intermittent reemergence of the narration usually occasions more redundancy than it's worth.  Anyway, the job involves tracking one Mitch MacAfee (Morrow), a test pilot (and electronics engineer), as part of a radar test, and suddenly he spots some kind of enormous shadowy object, yet there is no radar signature at all; responding to his report, the USAF scrambles fighters, and one pilot doesn't return, chalked up for the moment as an accidental crash—for which they're not very happy with MacAfee—though we know it was something else.

On the way home, MacAfee—along with that mathematician, Sally Caldwell (Mara Corday)—has a second encounter, this one corroborated by the pilot, moments before the "cloud too fast to be any cloud" knocks their plane right out of the sky.  MacAfee and Caldwell find refuge with a farmer (Lous Merrill), who's practically garrulous until he steps outside to prepare for the storm that's coming and sees something himself—La Carcagne, a creature he might not have believed in until he saw it, straight out of French-Canadian folklore.  (And hence the "literary basis": this "creature of French-Canadian folklore" exists in two places only, this movie and a Samuel Hopkins Adams short story originally published in The New Yorker in 1951 and retitled, in a collection of Adams's Grandfather Tales, "Munk Birgo and the Carcagne"; according to its narrator, it's the only Grandfather Tale that tilts towards horror, but Adams's swerve into weird fiction concerns none other than an enormous man-eating bird that haunts the north.  The unavoidable assumption is that one or other of the screenwriters, Samuel Newman or Paul Gangelin, actually thought Adams was reporting true Quebecois legendry—which won't square with their monster's origins anyway!—and it's a wonder Katzman wasn't sued.)

Well, on another plane, MacAfee and Caldwell argue over the pilot-engineer's doomy predictions graphed upon a map of North America, and agree to make out instead, but, eventually, the number of lost aircraft—and the number of reports of a giant bird—have stacked up so high that the establishment can no longer ignore it, no matter how preposterous it sounds, and Lt. Gen. Considine (Morris Ankrum) brings MacAfee and Caldwell back in.  Joined by Dr. Noyman (Edgar Barrier), their task is to devise some way to destroy this unreal monster, who defies radar and has shrugged off every conventional attack they've attempted.

And this is where The Giant Claw starts getting itself into trouble.  Up till now it's been an exemplar of its form, more or less, confidently executing the Them! (or Godzilla) playbook, teasing an out-of-focus monster that nobody believes could be real, and even tying him to crackpot superstition (while a giant footprint reserved solely for our notice tells us that it's not only crackpot superstition), until that PB4Y crew becomes its individually parachute-wrapped snacks.  (And what I didn't already mention is the excellent sound design, itself inspired by Them!, though I cannot tell you how highly I rate this monster's alternating cackling and tittering cries.  Meanwhile, you want to know the worst thing about those much-maligned special effects?  The stock footage that Katzman and Sears are bringing to the table, mostly but not exclusively from their personal library—the Capitol attack from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers is visible for enough frames to make itself distractingly recognizable—though the kicker is the indifference to matching the modelwork and throwing in whatever "jet fighter footage" they found first, a fairly noticeable difference when one shot's a Shooting Star and another's a Delta Dagger.)  But still: the wobbliest thing about the movie so far is probably just the antagonistic romance, which only suffers from not having so much as a hint of set-up, and even this gets largely redeemed by the rhythms of crankiness and cuteness that Morrow and Corday find together in the scene-long module that's given over to their romance so the movie doesn't need to bother much with it anywhere else.  The escalation of the threat, from inconvenience to air travelers to global menace, is handled with aplomb, and, as I already implied, I got a real kick out of that scene of carcagne denialists who immediately die.

But The Giant Claw's very achievement is, itself, a pitfall, and not one it understands how to gracefully navigate.  I invoked kaijus earlier, and what we've got is the American 50s monster movie that most fully breaks out of its national idiom, being perhaps the sole American monster movie of the 50s that could be called, without any fear of contradiction, a Japanese-style monster movie.  And here the problem lies: when Japanese kaiju filmmakers posited their godlike monsters, invulnerable to all conventional means of destruction, that was usually just what their monsters were like, and even if that makes no sense, well, you roll with it, because the sophisticate's answer to "so what makes Godzilla invincible to missiles?" is "hush, I'm trying to watch a movie"; the American film, however, is insistent on logicking out a reason.  Where the styles converge is that our scientists must be narratively useful, and develop the unconventional means of this monster's destruction—"you're in this up to your necks anyway," sez the general, and that is as good a reason as any for MacAfee and Caldwell to stick around till the end.

That's fair, and it makes for good sci-fi drama, something which is not-infrequently missing in whole or in part from 1950s-era American monster flicks.  It's a good impulse, then, but the result is some of the most repulsively insane gobbledygook you'll ever fucking hear, and this is why The Giant Claw is bad—though I hasten to repeat, if it is bad!—this cavalcade of utter bullshit that seeks to explain that, in fact, this giant bird flew through space, from a galaxy made of antimatter, so it's antimatter, wait no it's not, it simply exudes a field of antiparticles that constitute a defensive force field, so we need to slap together some exceedingly small atoms to pass through the nanoscopic gaps in its armor, and it's almost too much to bear, even if I do, unabashedly, enjoy the science montages it affords with Morrow, Corday, and Barrier sweating their way through the problem and somehow even glaring holes straight through transparent vacuum tubes.  I have held in the past that The Giant Claw is definitely bad, but I just don't think that's very intellectually honest of me, not when I've seen the damn thing at least four times, and there's no way this will be the last.

Score: 6/10

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

• It's slightly remarkable that one or both of the writers must've had some grounding in particle physics as it was understood in 1957—their terminology is wrong, as they keep referring to "mu mesons," but then, in 1957, physicists' model was wrong—and you can indeed make tiny atoms substituting muons for electrons which, despite their short lives, even have practical application, like muonic tomography.  It's extremely remarkable, however, that they knew this only to use it to solve the story problem they'd caused by creating a giant alien bird that produces a cloud of antimatter, like an Antimatter Pigpen.
• Antimatter would show up fine on radar.  (The high-energy plasma would also be noticeable!)

The morality of the past, in the future!:

• I'm beginning to wonder if for maybe an actual majority of Cardboard Science movies, the sexism they throw at their lady scientists is there purely as a sop to their sexist audience, to placate them so that the movies can get their money's worth out of their actresses and contrive to put them in the damned finale anyway.  So, on balance... good?
• One may feel like MacAfee is a little slow on the uptake with his French-Canadian host's report, given that he's already seen some pretty weird shit himself.

Sensawunda:

• Clearly limited for most by the received wisdom of the crumminess of the puppet, but, truly, this is one of my favorite monsters of the 50s.