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.
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.
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