1950s SF film
The Giant Claw, 1957, USA DIRECTED BY FRED F. SEARS
UFO sightings become real when "a bird as big as a battleship" terrorises the skies over North America. At face value The Giant Claw is a pretty average ’50s B-movie with acres of stock Air Force footage and standard performances from the cast that never take you far beneath the skins of the characters. But... then there's the main draw, the extraterrestrial bird itself, a laughably bad marionette that can only ever inspire pity for the cast. The director Fred F. Sears, who only the previous year had directed the minor classic Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers, never let the cast know what this "feathered nightmare on wings" would finally look like, and maybe that was just as well otherwise his film would never have made it to completion. He ended up contracting a low-budget model maker in Mexico City to make the bird instead of the original idea to use stop-motion animation from Ray Harryhausen, which would certainly have cost plenty more but would also have given the movie a certain caché as he'd recently created the creatures for 20 Million Miles to Earth and It Came from Beneath the Sea. And you have to feel sorry for the film's star Jeff Morrow: The Giant Claw premièred in his home town and so embarrassed was he by the audience's laughter every time the bird appeared that he left the cinema early, hoping no one would recognise him. It was a box-office turkey, although it's viewed today with genuine affection because you know precisely what you're in for: good mindless entertainment, especially at those frequent moments when it mistakenly tries (and happily fails) to take itself seriously.