Motion Picture Daily (Jul-Sep 1957)

4 Motion Picture Daily Monday, July 1, 1957 Teaser ad and 1-Sheet the 0drse 0f>9 Frankenstein oon PLEASE TRY NOT TO FAINT SOON THE SHOWMANSHIP OF WARNER BROS. WILL BE SEEN AGAIN FEATURE REVIEWS The Giant Claw Columbia Hollywood, June 30 Science-fiction enthusiasts are given a double workout by this Sam Katzman production directed by Fred F. Sears and played out proficiently by Jeff Morrow, Mara Corday, Morris Ankrum, Edgar Barrier and other dependable performers. The picture gives followers of this type of melodrama their first enjoyable workout in granting the possibility that a bird big enough to gobble down airplanes and railroad trains without showing up on radar screens or succumbing to rocket and cannon attack might exist, and their second in accepting the scientific apparatus employed in bringing the bird to a watery grave at picture's end. Producer, director and players work together well. Unlike most stories hinging on the activities of abnormal creatures, this one brings the monstrous bird into audience view immediately and reveals it repeatedly, at long range and close up, thereafter. The script by Samuel Newman and Paul Gangelin opens with Morrow, an electronics engineer in Air Force employ, piloting a plane solo in a test flight with Miss Corday and Officer Ankrum recording his readings via radio. Suddenly a huge shape flies over his plane and he reports it at once as a UFO (unidentified flying object). Radar does not pick it up, however, so he is disbelieved on landing and accused of perpetrating a prank. Steadily thereafter his report is duplicated by others received from various planes, still without radar corroboration, and finally, after the flying monster has devoured several planes and people in flight, the nations of the terrorized world pool their most powerful weapons to slay it. But bullets and bombs bounce off of its impregnable body. The means by which Morrow succeeds in dealing death to the creature is as surprising as the existence of the bird itself. Ralph Hammeras and George Teague created the technical effects, some of the best ever devised. Running time, 73 minutes. General classification. Release, in June. William R. Weaver Trooper Hook Fielding— UA Hollywood, June 30 Joel McCrea and Barbara Stanwyck have grown-up story material to work with in this Sol Baer Fielding Production and they give it their experienced and excellent best, with Earl Holliman, Edward Andrews, John Dehner, Rudolfo Acosta and others in a large cast measuring up stoutly to their standard. Under steady direction of Charles Marquis Warren they give the story by Jack Schaefer and screenplay by Martin Berkley, David Victor and Herbert Little, Jr., the impact of powerful performances consistently maintained. The picture, adult in the correct sense of the word, is likely to play to rising grosses. The story opens on an Indian massacre of a small detachment of U.S. Cavalry, promptly followed by arrival of a larger force which captures the Apache war party under Chief Nanchez. McCrea plays Trooper Hook, whose orders are to take Nanchez prisoner and bring him in, and Miss Stanwyck plays Nanchez's white wife, Cora, and mother of his small son, Quito, played by Terry Lawrence. Although McCrea's men resent his kindness to Cora, who turns out to have been captured by Nanchez on her way from the East to join her rancher husband, Dehner, and forced to marry him, he sets out to take her and the boy to Dehner's home near Tucson. First, however, he delivers Nanchez to his superiors at a fort from which the prisoner shortly escapes to rejoin his braves and ambush the stage coach in which his son, wife and McCrea are riding. For much of the running time the picture centers around the journey of the stagecoach through magnificently photographed terrain under menace of Apaches bent on getting possession of the Indian boy. But it is not until McCrea has delivered Cora and Quito to Dehner, who is willing to accept Cora but not the boy, that the story rises to its climax and rushes to a dramatic conclusion. Running time, 81 minutes. Adult classification. Release, in June. W. R. W. Documentary ( Continued from page 1 ) distribution. Two of the films, eacl running about three and one-hal .minutes, were specially made for in sertion in newsreels, while the thin was a special clip made for showin on the Break the Bank TV show. The company has set a budget o $250,000 for preparation and distribu tion of these films. They were edite from over 40,000 feet of film shot o location by a special unit and camera man and tell the story of the makin of the picture under what both Hoi den and Spiegel agreed were "primi tive conditions." The program include 10 three-and-one-half minute new features, plus two featurettes, on running 30 minutes and the other I minutes. The latter, said Spiegel, ar now being edited by the film's direc tor, David Lean, in London. Expects Maximum Coverage As a result of these short documen taries, Lazarus said, "The Bridge Ove the River Kwai" should obtain "th most comprehensive coverage any filn has ever received" in a pre-sellin campaign. In addition, the specia camera crew shot other material fo use on upcoming TV shows to be seer in the fall. All the material was sho in standard black-and-white, because according to Larazus, it is impossible to suggest on TV the scope and coloi of CinemaScope and Technicolor ir! which the feature was made. "Bridge," which co-stars Alec Guin ness and Jack Hawkins, was filmec entirely on location in Ceylon anc will be released before the end of '5 Rites for Yearsley HOLLYWOOD, June 30.-Privat funeral services were held here yester day for C. L. Yearsley, 79, who succumbed Thursday to a heart ailment; Long inactive in the industry, the deceased had been advertising-publicity director of First National Pictures in 1917, continuing with Warner Brothers after that company acquired FN His widow survives. 'Sweet* Sets Record Hecht, Hill and Lancaster's "Sweet Smell of Success" has set an all-time United Artists record at Loew's State Theatre on Broadway with a first-da) gross of $7,261. ORSEOF