THE GIANT CLAW (1957). Colorized.

THE GIANT CLAW is a 1957 American monster film from Columbia Pictures, produced by Sam Katzman, directed by Fred F. Sears, that stars Jeff Morrow and Mara Corday. 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.

PLOT
Mitch MacAfee (Morrow), a civil aeronautical engineer, while engaged in a radar test flight near the North Pole, spots an unidentified flying object. Three jet fighter aircraft are scrambled to pursue and identify the object but one aircraft goes missing. Officials are initially angry at MacAfee over the loss of a pilot and jet over what they believe to be a hoax.
When MacAfee and mathematician Sally Caldwell (Corday) fly back to New York, their aircraft also comes under attack by a UFO. With their pilot dead, they crash-land in the Adirondacks, where Pierre Broussard (Lou Merrill), a French-Canadian farmer, comes to their rescue, and reports seeing a giant monster bird he calls La Carcagne. MacAfee's report is met with bewilderment and skepticism, but the military authorities are forced to take his story seriously after several more aircraft disappear. They discover that the gigantic bird "as big as a battleship", purported to come from an antimatter galaxy, is responsible for all the incidents. MacAfee, Caldwell, Dr. Karol Noymann (Edgar Barrier), Gen. Considine (Morris Ankrum), and Gen. Van Buskirk (Robert Shayne) work feverishly to develop a way to defeat the seemingly invincible creature.
The climactic showdown takes place in Manhattan, when the gigantic bird attacks both the Empire State Building and United Nations building. It is defeated by a special type of exotic atom, muonic atoms, deployed from the tail gun position of a B-25 bomber aircraft, which successfully collapses the creature's antimatter shield and allows missiles to hit and kill the monster. The giant bird plummets into the Atlantic Ocean outside New York, and the last sight of it is a claw sinking beneath the ocean.

CAST
Jeff Morrow as Mitch MacAfee
Mara Corday as Sally Caldwell
Morris Ankrum as Lt. Gen Edward Considine
Lou Merrill as Pierre Broussard (as Louis D. Merrill)
Edgar Barrier as Dr. Karol Noymann
Robert Shayne as Gen. Van Buskirk
Frank Griffin as Pete - Pilot (as Ruell Shayne)
Clark Howat as Maj. Bergen
Morgan Jones as Lieutenant, Radar Officer

CRITIQUES
Critical reception was generally negative, with a film writer and historian commenting, "This would have been an ordinarily bad movie of its type, with a good performance by Jeff Morrow, if the special effects had been industry standard for the time. That, however, is not what happened. The Claw is not just badly rendered, it is hilariously rendered, resembling nothing so much as Warner Bros. cartoon-character Beaky Buzzard. Once seen, you will never forget this awesomely silly creation".
The Giant Claw has been mocked for the quality of its special effects.[9] The menacing bird, in particular, is considered by many to be badly made, being a puppet with a very odd face. Another film critic noted that the film disappointed for those reasons, "(a) lack of decent special effects ruins the running battle between colossal bird and fighter jets. Big bird is laughable".TV Guide panned the film, awarding it a score of 1 out of 4, criticizing the film's monster as "preposterous-looking".
Not all reviews of the film were negative. Allmovie gave the film a positive review, stating, "The Giant Claw has a terrible reputation that isn't entirely deserved – to be sure, producer Sam Katzman opted for the cheapest, worst-looking monster that one could imagine, a ridiculous-looking giant bird puppet that makes the movie seem ludicrous. But except for those moments when the title monster is on the screen, the movie isn't bad – so for the first 27 minutes, until it appears for the first time and evokes its first rounds of laughter, the picture is working just fine within the confines of its budget, script, and cast". Allmovie also complimented Morrow's performance as "the best thing in the picture".