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Longtime Friend of the Show Ivan Shreve, from Thrilling Days of Yesteryear reports that Beverly Garland has died at the age of 82.  Coming on the heels of Forrest J. Ackerman’s passing, it seems that Death, as I mentioned at Ivan’s place, has been toiling a bit too hard in the vineyards of pulp and B-grade entertainment, and really needs to take a holiday.

bevpickle1.jpg

Triumph of the Dill

To my eternal delight and gratitude, Garland was in a lot of bad movies, and boy did she know it.   But fortunately, Beverly never considered herself, as she put it, “very much of a passive kind of actress,” and rather than winking at the audience, or mumbling her way through with a bare minimum of effort to show she was slumming, Garland would seize the viewer and shovel that crappy film down his gullet with a trowel.  Surrounded by cheap effects and mediocre actors, she seemed to be throwing off sparks, generating such intensity in her meandering, poorly written scenes it was as though she was saying, “Yes, I know, this whole thing’s a ramshackle abomination that isn’t worth bottom billing at a Drive-in triple feature, but as long as I’m on screen we’re all going to pretend it’s actually a movie.”

Forget believing a man can fly; Beverly Garland could make you believe anything — that a cold-blooded bayou bitch who’d left a string of dead bodies in her wake could be moved to seek redemption after one touch from Mike “Touch” Connors, or that upon seeing a man with the head of an alligator, the proper response is to scream, rather than shoot milk from your nose.

The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide overflows with encomiums to Bev, including this analysis of her appeal by writer Paul Chaplin:

Now I could get into how life is hard, and how we men rely on women for motivation, because sometimes we just lose any sense that it’s all worth it.  So it’s nice if women are peppy, at least, and if they can manage what Ms Garland manages, bringing true fire to all she does, you can’t beat that.  it just makes life a lot easier. [...]  All of her women combine intelligence and aggressivness with a strong (and I mean strong) femininity, and women like that as well as men do.

I don’t mean to imply that “intelligent” and “feminine” are usually not found together…[h]owever, genuinely strong and motivated women are rare in movies, especially the movies we’re forced to watch.

Then you look at Beverly Garland in It Conquered the World.

Married to an idiot, she realizes it and takes matters into her own hands.  She finds the Venusian pickle and delivers a dressing down that had to leave the poor creature more than a little abashed.  Unfortunately she’s then eaten, but she goes down shooting, probably praying she’ll get stuck in the bastard’s throat and choke him.

In certain respects it’s a ridiculous scene.  Yet she delivers her lecture with the strongest commitment you could hope for.  In that moment she is a woman enraged at a pickle.  I mean this.  It shows such pride to perform like that, and to make sure your characters all have pride.

Check Ivan’s place for more on Bev’s career, including her stint — unknown to me — as TV’s proto-Pepper Anderson.

12 Responses to “And A Flight Of Vlasics Sing Thee To Thy Rest…”

She DOES have at least one great movie to her credit: the 1968 cult flick “Pretty Poison”. She played Tuesday Weld’s horrible bitch of a mother.
She also had a guest spot on “Friends” as Monica’s card-sharp Aunt, and was so good I kinda wish they’d made her a recurring character, or at least let her return a couple more times.

The Poor Woman’s Ida Lupino. RIP.

Forrest J. Ackerman’s
In the name of all that’s pedantic, I’ll have to ask you to remove the full stop after the J.

He’s one punctuation mark away from having a pornstar name. :)

If you haven’t heard it already, see if you can dig up Frank Zappa’s spoken intro to “Cheepnis” on Roxy and Elswhere. In a lovely explanation of why It Conquered the World epitomizes the movies he loves, he describes the monster as “a sort of rounded-off pup tent affair”.

Beverly Garland was the woman who made me appreciate a good bra.

By the way, can someone explain to me how a woman can be born a Fessenden, marry a Garland (thus her stage name), a Campbell and a Crank (yes you read that right) and somehow manage to have a child named “Goodman”?

It doesn’t mention if this particular brat was adopted, which is a possibility of course.

And her third husband’s name wasn’t “just” Crank, it was Fillmore Crank. There’s some kind of joke or Moe Szyslak prank-phonecall possibility there.

Ahh nooooooo. Now I’ll have to drag out my illegal copy of MST3K’s version of It Conqured the world – which among other things shows why spagetti westerns were the best thing ever to happen to Lee Van Cleef

Hey, she played opposite Ross Martin(a very underrated character actor who died too damn young) in a Twilight Zone episode, that makes her cool in my book.

I love love love “It Conquered the World” way more (obviously) than I should. I love the fact that it was filmed almost entirely within walking distance of the Beachwood Market. I love how Bev gets on the radio and tells that big okra a thing or two, how she hates its living guts and is gonna kill it. Sparks indeed.

Yet she delivers her lecture with the strongest commitment you could hope for. In that moment she is a woman enraged at a pickle.

What modern actress could pull this off? Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, or even Michelle Williams? I think not. It would take a strong political Conservative like Janine Turner or Patricia Heaton, as they could imagine the cucumber to be the DEMONcrap establishment trying to insinuate Marxism into our Republican Republic. Shame on you LIEbrals, with your LIEbral actresses who seek to destroy the USA of America!

Something to say?