The Giant Claw (1957)

directed by Fred F. Sears

USA

74 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Whew, it's been a while. I honestly didn't intend to disappear for so long, but I do have a (semi-)valid excuse this time, because I've been writing a book.¹ I don't know what to do with it, and it may never get read by anyone other than me, but it is a book, and I am writing it.

To me The Giant Claw, despite its reputation as a classic silly B-movie, is as serious as you choose to make it. Art is never created in a vacuum, and most of the really great science fiction pictures of the 1950s - and I'm not necessarily just counting American ones in this, though they are some of the most reactionary - stem from new fears born out of the wake of the second World War. The people who made The Giant Claw were not that far removed from a time when travel by airplane was just not a thing at all. These were people for whom the use of aircraft during war for the first time in human history was within living memory - for their parents, certainly, if not for themselves.

The idea that the sky isn't safe anymore, that an unknown enemy could attack from above at any minute and target not just indiscriminately but with precision, swooping down to snatch up innocent American teenagers on a joyride, or trains carrying precious raw materials to build up our booming postwar economy - that is a fear that really comes to light only in the first half of the twentieth century. And the fact that the terror-bird in The Giant Claw can only be stopped when the Americans invent a bigger, scarier, more scientific weapon than they ever have before - aided by a vaguely German scientist - is also a distinctly postwar convention.

So, you have to be aware of cultural context when you watch The Giant Claw, but also, yeah, the monster is very much just a giant turkey from space that's made of antimatter. That is absolutely what it is.

The whole "antimatter" thing felt completely ridiculous to me when it was first introduced by our scientist du jour, but after I had sat with it for a minute I found that I kind of liked it. I'm sure it was a product of the writers going "uh, how do we make it so just firing a bunch of rockets at the bird doesn't kill it and end the movie within 30 minutes", but it effectively takes an otherwise laughable monster and elevates it to an almost Lovecraftian level. It's not really a bird, it's something that looks like a bird; it comes from somewhere beyond our comprehension, and while we may find it analogous to things we have on Earth, under a microscope it is something even our most advanced scientific equipment cannot make sense of. I wish the movie had spent more time on this aspect of the monster, because it takes such pains to drive home the point that this bird is actually some kind of extraterrestrial freak of nature, but then immediately goes back to treating it like a big huge stupid bird.

I thought the practical effects were - and I will get pelted with eggs for this - pretty great. I really liked the bird. I've expounded before on how I much prefer monster movies to show their monster sparingly, since what you imagine is always scarier than what even the best special-effects team could show you, but sometimes it is better to have an actual physical thing that you can look at. And for what it's worth, they do a good job of it. They do. That awful scene where Mr. and Mrs. Snappy Dialogue and their friend French Canadian Stereotype are shooting at the bird's egg is a particularly strong example of this - the bird's face looks very lifelike; its nostrils move and its eyes roll, it feels like an animate creature.

I'm not saying this isn't a silly B-movie, I'm just saying that every silly B-movie has something behind it that's worth considering for longer than it takes to have a laff. Giving some thought to the intent and motive of the human artists who produced atomic-age B-movies can tell us a lot about why our society is the way it is right now. I'm afraid that AI art is going to make it even more difficult to get people to understand how important it is to study the meaning of a film and where it comes from and what it's trying to say. If we lose that kind of media literacy, we lose the ability to learn how we got here.

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1 I promise it's just a fiction book and not a biography.