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Solved: Were THE GIANT CLAW Special Effects Really Filmed in Mexico?

(Warning. This item may be no big deal, and there really was no research involved. But I was intrigued just the same.)

CineSavant today offers a research answer for an old question pertaining to the Sam Katzman science fiction thriller The Giant Claw. That’s of course the show with the gooney-bird monster that has provoked laughter and head-scratching since it was first screened in 1957. In the review I refrained from posting images of the bird-monster, but CineSavant’s Office of Standards and Practices now insists that I show readers no mercy.

Much of what we once knew about how these movies were made was really just rumors — once upon a time it was oft said that the 1933 King Kong was played by a man in a costume. The rumor has circulated forever that the special effects for The Giant Claw — those terrible images of a piñata- like turkey flying on marionette strings over some unconvincing miniatures — were produced in Mexico. When I wrote my latest review I balked at repeating the Mexico story. It sounded like something Sam Katzman might have said in defense of the film’s quality, an easy slur aimed at Mexican movie craftsmanship.

My bias regarding cheapskate Hollywood producers being what it is, I had difficulty picturing the producer wanting to pay for a long distance phone call to Mexico City. No Latin-sounding names appear in the film’s credits, but the main titles do credit well-known Hollywood veterans Ralph Hammeras and George Teague. Where’s the proof of a Mexican connection?

When uninformed, it’s easy to extrapolate dozens of possibilities, so naturally I do that all the time. I imagined that Hammeras and Teague produced the Claw’s chintzy effects right here in town, perhaps in someone’s garage. I even went so far as to imagine that the Mexico story may have been a smokescreen to trick the Guilds, to allow Hammeras and Teague two secretly work a non-union crew.

But I’m now happy to report that, thanks to input from helpful CineSavant correspondents …

… I now have what would seem the final answer to the ‘Mexico or no Mexico’ question!  Fans that lie awake worrying about the issue can now rest easy.

First, CineSavant advisor Gary Teetzel turned up some Trade Paper items about The Giant Claw, but not really anything specific about the film’s Special Effects. Then, film research authority Tom Weaver read my guessing game in the review and offered up a helpful quote from the November 15, 1956 issue of The Hollywood Reporter. The brief item, a blurb really, seemed pretty clear on the subject:

“Sam Katzman, following completion of his current The Night the World Exploded, flies to Mexico City on 11/24 for a two-week stay to supervise special effects filming for The Giant Claw. Special photography will be by Ralph Hammeras & George Teague.”

But Tom then implied that the item didn’t conclusively settle the matter. The Hollywood trade papers, Tom said, sometimes encouraged producers to make up items about future plans. The information really needed corroboration.

The best thing about CineSavant is the unexpected help that comes in from knowledgeable, well-read friends. I hadn’t heard from blogger and film investigator Kevin Pyrtle for a while. On September 17 he showed me corroborating proof about The Giant Claw’s Mexico City special effects shoot, from an interview with none other than the legendary effects man Ralph Hammeras himself. The answer has been in print for almost 40 years and readily available to film fans.

Hammeras was a pro from the early days of silent film. He has a lifetime of impressive movie credits and is credited with pioneering the glass matte shot and rear projection process photography. His camera tricks combined with Willis O’Brien’s animation skills made the 1925 The Lost World the technical marvel that it is. Other notable Hammeras films are Just Imagine (1930), Dante’s Inferno (1935), In Old Chicago (1939) The Great Dictator (1940), and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954).

The Ralph Hammeras interview was conducted by the top chronicler of visual effects Don Shay, and appeared in Issue #15 of Shay’s magazine Cinefex: The Journal of Cinematic Illusions. The impressive account of a career that spanned five decades is long and detailed. Only a sentence or so directly refers to The Giant Claw but Hammeras goes on to explain working conditions for another movie that applied to Claw as well. I’m going to quote relevant passages and paraphrase the rest.

It’s right at the end of the article. After being loaned out by Fox to work on Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Ralph Hammeras’ workflow slowed down:

“(On some later work) I had occasion to renew my association with Willis O’Brien. In September 1957,^* I went down to Mexico City to do a picture for Columbia called The Giant Claw. It was about a giant prehistoric bird that attacked New York City. We worked at the Tepeac Studio. When I had been there about two months, I got a letter from O’Brien. He was signed up to do a picture called The Black Scorpion for an independent producer, and he wrote asking me about the working conditions, plus the labor situation. I wrote back telling him that if he intended to come down to Mexico, he could cut his costs in half from what they would be in Hollywood. So he came down.”

^* (Note: Hammeras is surely one year off here, and meant to say 1956.)

Hammeras talks about about helping Willis O’Brien with Mexican red tape and labor regulations, and then to set up O’Brien’s Tepeac studio work space. He then continues:

“While (O’Brien) was completing his animation puppets (for The Black Scorpion), I helped him with the miniatures and painted scenes for the backgrounds – gratis. …. I think he worked there only about three months. A lot of the studio personnel were sorry to see him go, because he would invite them into the projection room when he was running his daily rushes. O’Brien did this to get their reaction to the scene he was working on and, of course, the natives got a big bang out of it.”

In the full article we find that Ralph Hammeras supervised or contributed effects work to a great many pictures without screen credit, that don’t end up on his filmography in the IMDB:

“Back at Fox, I did another big Jules Verne picture, Journey to the Center of the Earth. After that, I worked sparingly, because I had completed my contract commitments and younger men were taking over. My last two pictures were The Longest Day — with some miniatures — and Cleopatra, a painting of ancient Rome. I retired June 30, 1963, after 46 years, 6 months and 15 days in the film business.”

So the ‘mystery’ of The Giant Claw was no mystery to the readers of Cinefex … it’s only we who plumb the free-range void of social media that can’t be certain of our facts. That makes hard research by the likes of journalist and historian Don Shay all the more valuable. Cinefex magazine is no more, but it maintains a website where back issues may be purchased digitally: Cinefex Back Issues.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Any interest in old-time radio out there?  Gary Teetzel knows what lurks in the hearts of men, and sends along this 2006 National Public Radio Interview with Musician Rosa Rio, the late radio and movie organist (who also provided music scores for hundreds of silent films for Video Yesteryear.

Hosted by Scott Simon, the show was recorded at the Tampa Theater in Tampa Florida, with Ms. Rio seated at the theater’s massive organ. She talks about playing accompaniment for the radio show The Shadow when Orson Welles was the star, and we hear a bite from that program. She describes the theater organ for Simon, a ‘three-manual, fifteen-rank instrument with everything on it.’ She reminisces about Welles, and gives us a demonstration of the various sounds her organ can make.

The radio show reminds me of the famed movie organists that accompanied silent movies for our UCLA screenings. Chauncey Haines had played in huge theaters in the 1920s; his authentic music knocked us out, both for Harold Lloyd comedies and dramatic features like Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm. For Lloyd’s The Kid Brother in UCLA’s Royce Hall, Haines had to play at full volume to be heard above the audience laughter. The psychological effect was strong enough to cure anyone of depression.

Checking out my clumsy pasteup job on a still from Planet of the Vampires last Tuesday, valued CineSavant connection Edward Sullivan directed my attention to this ‘MakerBot Thingiverse’ page by Cory ‘ShadowCory’ Collins. I haven’t figured it out fully but it appears to showcase of selections of items, some movie related, that he’s fabricated with a home 3-D printer…. plus what look to be some post-forming modeling and painting skills.

Some space cadets from the Mario Bava space film are there, along with our beloved Devil Girl from Mars. Also catching our eye is a nifty maquette setup from Invaders from Mars.  So market these things already!  The two Myoo-tants bracing the Alien Intelligence make me want to whisper in a certain major film collector’s ear:  “You are getting sleepy … sleepy … release it in 4K … 4k … 4k!“

The Warner Archive Collection announced last Tuesday the balance of their Halloween Blu-rays for this year, two more surprise favorites. In addition to the already publicized 1935 Peter Lorre horror item Mad Love we’ll be offered the Deborah Kerr terror-in-French-wine-country shocker Eye of the Devil with David Niven, David Hemmings and Sharon Tate. Then there’s the follow-up feature to Village of the Damned, 1963’s Children of the Damned ↑. It’s a non-invasion rethink in which the rotten ‘establishment’ is evil, and the misunderstood international selection of ‘X-Men’- like kids are innocent.

Oh yes, the WAC is also giving us the MGM classic Dinner at Eight (which I should have seen 40 years ago) and the odd but interesting Blu-ray selection Mary Stevens, M.D.. It’s a good Warners pre-Code picture, perhaps chosen for its frankness about the difficulties of professional women… a theme that mostly disappeared with the enforcement of the Production Code.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Today my CineSavant Column entry is about film, although it’s the kind of shameless ‘look what I’m working on’ announcement that these days seems to be 20% of my Facebook feed. Three years ago my friend Ulrich Bruckner of the Blu-ray company Explosive Media granted me a wish and produced a fancy special edition disc of Major Dundee, allowing me to contribute to the overall concept and the extras. The success of that release spurred two more special editions from Australia and England that kept my spirits up during these Covid Years.

Now Ulrich is busy pulling together a fancy special edition Blu-ray for Robert Aldrich’s Italian epic Sodoma e Gomorra, released here in 1963 as The Last Days of Sodom and Gomorrah. Up ’til now our only access to the show has been a dreary mal-formatted DVD that I think is OOP. The same eyesore transfer is also being cablecast on the Fox Movie channel. Ulrich has gone to the trouble to commission a new scan of the long version of the movie in Italy, from original film elements. It was originally shown in Italy in a shorter version but they must have gone back at some point and prepared a ‘versione integrale’ — Explosive’s Blu-ray will be full-length.

As you can see by the new image scans the visual improvement is really apparent — at its full width and clarity the show looks big and expensive again. It was expensive: between this and Visconti’s The Leopard, Italy’s biggest studio Titanus practically went out of business. The stars are Stewart Granger, Pier Angeli, Stanley Baker, Anouk Aimee and Rossana Podestá, the great music score is by Miklos Rozsa. I think I have a handle on the controversy surrounding the involvement of Sergio Leone — full discussions of the movie appear in several reliable movie biographies.

The screenplay delivers useful advice, such as the immortal words “Beware of Sodomite patrols!”  The lavish Bible epic will be released by the German Explosive Media label; as was Dundee it’s primarily for the Deutsch-speaking market but the plan is for it to be Region A friendly and carry English & Italian Language tracks. The projected release date is December — a Christmas present for devotees of director Robert Aldrich.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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This item has nothing to do with movies or video discs, which is fine with me. As a kid I loved the lizards known as ‘horny toads’ and was always delighted when they showed up around our little housing development in San Bernardino circa 1961. I think they became scarce as soon as people moved in, with their cats and cars. The tough little lizards had saucer-shaped bodies and really interesting scaly hides, with spikes and bumps like the dinosaurs we kids daydreamed about. I don’t think these horned lizards could be found back East. Tough luck, New Jersey.

This article gives me a big lift. Scientists are going to the trouble to try to breed the things: “Fort Worth Zoo to Release 1,000th Texas Horned Lizard Into the Wild.” We never tried to make them pets. They ate red ants but never in captivity. We’d hang onto them for a few minutes and let ’em go. Loved those guys!

The Film Detective recently brought us dandy restorations of Flight to Mars and A Life at Stake, and they now have firm release dates for their next two releases. These two are special because of FD’s remastering efforts, the first film especially. It has yet to be seen in an acceptable video transfer.

Arriving on October 5 is The Amazing Mr. X, an excellent film noir thriller with a great cast. Turhan Bey is given a substantial role for once. Lynn Bari and Cathy O’Donnell are quite good, and the film’s terrific noir look is by the legendary cameraman John Alton.

The company’s second entry in the Richard Cunha ‘quadrilogy’ of 1958-59 horror sci-fi is a real Z-picture, Frankenstein’s Daughter. It’s the one where the monster-mask maker didn’t read the script — the female monster seemingly undergoes a sex change. Tom Weaver handles commentary chores. This one will get here on October 19, just in time for Halloween.

Never thinking of himself, our esteemed associate Gary Teetzel helpfully gives you a break!  He knows you’re already wracking your brains, trying to think of what to give him — ‘the fan who has everything’ — for Christmas.

This year the solution is easy: just send him one of these fancy Godzilla Pinball Machines. Sadly, the Limited Edition is already sold out, so you’d better hurry to send Gary either the Pro or the Premium. He only asked for one, but we can do better than that — if he gets ten or twelve of these gaudy machines from grateful, cash-rich CineSavant readers, all the better. When you want to play Godzilla Pinball, what’s worse than having to walk all the way to the next room?

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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First up today is one big, happy surprise — MGM’s underdog 1935 horror classic Mad Love will be arriving very soon, on October 19. Peter Lorre, Colin Clive, Frances Drake … directed by Karl Freund. Who forgets Ed Brophy’s date with the guillotine?  It’s a real favorite.

And there’s still more time before Halloween for more possible horror to be announced.

Next, we have a double link to a horror tale by the Uruguayan author Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937): if you harbor a penchant for mainline Edgar Allan Poe- type fiction and haven’t heard of Quiroga, this may well appeal. There’s a great deal of macabre fiction in classic Latin American literature, beyond Luis Borges.

The story in question is 1907’s The Feather Pillow, original Spanish title El Almohadón de Plumas. It’s extremely brief yet packs a real sting of dread into its five-minute read.

This first link is to a beautiful stop-motion version of the short story, filmed by Hugo Covarrubias in Chile in 2007: El Almohadón de Plumas. It’s handsomely done. It uses the original text, and has English subtitles.

You can read the surprisingly brief original short story as well, on this The Short Story Project page, in English or Spanish (or Hebrew!). And if you want to read about the disturbing, Poe- like life of author Horacio Quiroga, here’s his Wikipedia Entry. This guy seemingly had various forms of death following him around his whole life.

Now it’s fun clippings time. This is self-explanatory — it’s a full-page trade paper ad from Warners touting the big success of Them! in 1954. Its box office heft is being compared to that of the previous year’s The Beast from 20,000 fathoms, a major hit that surely prompted the studio to green-light a noirish sci-fi thriller about giant ants.

It reminds me of similar trade paper ads from 1977, when George Lucas was kidding Steven Spielberg, boasting in expensive full page announcements that Star Wars had overtaken the previous $$ money bonanza Jaws at the ticket turnstyles. This battle of the monsters 23 years before is nowhere near as historical, but I thought CineSavant readers would appreciate it.

Bird, Bird, Bird … the Bird is the Word.

This has been a frantic research week!  Looking for trade paper references to back up the idea that, yes, maybe a Mexico City company did produce special effects for Sam Katzman’s glorious turkey turkey The Giant Claw, Gary Teetzel couldn’t access The Hollywood Reporter, that definitely reported Mexican location filming. The coverage found in three other trade papers ranged from mundane, to unbelievable. The images are zoom-able, if the print is too small…

How about Variety?  No, keep moving, nothing exciting to see there:

The Motion Picture Exhibitor review got an early crack at the show, with a derisive dismissal:

And what’s with Motion Picture Daily’s review?  “The technical effects are some of the best ever devised?”

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson