The Giant Claw

The Giant Claw (1957)

Flying beast out of prehistoric skies!

Global panic ensues when it is revealed that a mysterious UFO is actually a giant turkey-like bird that flies at supersonic speed and has no regard for life or architecture.

Date of release
1957-06-01
TMDB
4.8 / 10 (95)
Runtime
1h 14m
Genres
Science Fiction, Horror
Director
Fred F. Sears

Casting

Interesting facts

The Giant Claw is a 1957 American monster film from Columbia Pictures, produced by Sam Katzman, directed by Fred F. Sears, stars Jeff Morrow and Mara Corday, and features Morris Ankrum, Dabbs Greer, and Robert Shayne. Both Sears and Katzman were well known as low-budget B-film genre filmmakers. The film was released as a double feature with The Night the World Exploded.

Production

According to Richard Harland Smith of Turner Classic Movies, the inspiration for the story may have been taken from media reports about scientific discoveries in the field of particle physics, dealing with matter and antimatter. Other influences included the Japanese film Rodan (1956) and the Samuel Hopkins Adams story "Grandfather and a Winter's Tale", about la Carcagne, the "mythical bird-like banshee from French-Canadian folklore".

A character in The Giant Claw (Pierre Broussard) mistakes the menacing bird for la Carcagne, said to be a monster resembling a giant woman with a wolf's head and bat-like black wings and which, like the banshee, is a harbinger of death.

Under the working title Mark of the Claw, principal photography took place at Griffith Park, substituting for the New York-Canada border, with interiors filmed at the Columbia Annex near Monogram Studios from February 1 to 20, 1957.

Morrow later confessed in an interview that no one in the film knew what the titular monster looked like until the film's premiere. Morrow himself first saw the film in his hometown, and hearing the audience laugh every time the monster appeared on screen, he left the theater early, embarrassed that anyone there might recognize him; he allegedly went home and began drinking.

In May 1957, Sam Katzman stated in an interview with Variety that his films at the time had cost between $250,000 to $500,000. Despite the production using Columbia's B-unit, they had a much larger budget than other contemporaries.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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