Beverly Garland Movies

Jackie Cooper and Cleavon Little star as aerial photographers who spot a few threatening cracks in the San Andreas fault. Will anyone listen? No. Do they suffer in the subsequent quake? Yes, but not as expensively as the all-star cast in Earthquake. Still, The Day the Earth Moved doesn't aspire to be anything more than a modest made-for-TV disaster flick, and within its own limits it succeeds. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Based on the novel and play by Joseph Hayes, which in turn was inspired by an actual event, The Desperate Hours is the prototypical "family-trapped-by-criminals" drama. Escaped convicts Humphrey Bogart, Robert Middleton and Dewey Martin, seeking an appropriate hideout until they can make contact with their money supply, deliberately choose the suburban home of Fredric March and his family. The cold-blooded Bogart wants no trouble with the police, and he knows he can cower a family with children into cooperating with him. The convict orders March, his wife Martha Scott, and their children Richard Eyer and Mary Murphy, to go about their normal activities so as not to arouse suspicion. Young Eyer, upset that March won't lift a hand against Bogart, assumes that his father is a coward. The authorities are alerted when March, at Bogart's behest, draws money for the convict's getaway from the bank. Pushed to the breaking point, March begins subtly turning the tables on the convicts. Bogart's character in Desperate Hours was originally written for a much younger man, which explains why Paul Newman was able to play the part in the original Broadway production. The film was slated to co-star Bogart with his old pal Spencer Tracy, but this plan fell through when the two actors couldn't agree on who would get top billing. Desperate Hours was remade in 1991 with Mickey Rourke in the Bogart role. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

John Forsythe plays a successful television writer, Don Newell, who works on the "Crime of the Week" anthology series. Newell is being blackmailed by one of the program's actresses (Kathleen Hughes), who threatens to tell his wife of their clandestine affair. Arriving at the actress' apartment for a showdown, Newell discovers that the woman has been murdered. Though the writer is the principal suspect, the real killer is Henry Hayes (Edward G. Robinson), "Crime of the Week"'s research expert, who was also a blackmail victim. The inability of the police to solve the murder becomes the subject of the next "Crime of the Week" program. Hayes tries to deflect attention from himself by building up evidence against Newell, which the writer is compelled to use in his script. But Newelltumbles to Hayes' guilt, and includes this fatal clue in his "Crime of the Week" playlet. Hayes tries to kill Newell during the live broadcast, but the police arrive on the scene and shoot down Hayes. Although The Glass Web was originally released in 3-D, it is surprisingly light on "stereoptic" special effects. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The Healers is a soap opera-style affair starring John Forsythe as head researcher at a California medical center. Underfunded and understaffed, Forsythe tries his best to hold his humanitarian enterprise together. At home, Forsythe is plagued by a mercurial wife (Beverly Garland) and rebellious children (Shelly and Christian Juttner). So many "name" supporting players wander in and out of the proceedings that one might suspect The Healers was the pilot of a projected TV series...and one's suspicions would be correct. But with a Jackie Gleason/Julie Andrews special as its main competition, who was watching The Healers during its first telecast on May 22, 1974? ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this horror tale, Ellen Hardy (Stella Stevens) shares a home with widow Gladys Armstrong (Shelley Winters). Ellen is engaged to marry Gladys' stepson, Sam Aller (Skip Ward). Ellen receives word that her brother and sister are soon to be released from a mental institution and need a place to stay; Ellen asks Gladys if they can live with them, and Gladys agrees. But Ellen hasn't told Gladys the whole truth. It seems that the siblings were institutionalized because their parents were murdered, and it was widely believed that they were responsible (though their guilt in the crime could not be proven). Not long after the now-teenage brother and sister move in with Ellen and Gladys, Gladys finds out about their secret -- and she is soon discovered brutally murdered. The kids, however, both claim that they had nothing to do with Gladys' death, and that the other must have done it. In the meantime, Ellen has to dispose of the body without raising suspicion, but after Ellen buries the corpse in the garden, the dog digs up a severed hand, and now Ellen must make sure the dog doesn't give away her family's ugly secret. The original version of The Mad Room included two songs by the pop group Nazz, which included songwriter, guitarist, and producer Todd Rundgren several years before he reached stardom as a solo artist; due to licensing restrictions, the songs do not appear on all video releases of the film. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

In a mountain home, Dr. Cliff Groves (Robert Shayne) is working hard on the theories that have driven him to the point of overbearing obsession, frightening his sister Jan (Joyce Terry), who lives with him. When the local game warden is shocked to see what looks like a saber-tooth tiger in the area, he consults scientist Dr. Ross Harkness (Richard Crane) about the mysterious animal, and the two men decide to find the tiger and kill it. Meanwhile, Groves' experimentation has escalated. One night he injects himself and turns into a savage Neanderthal man who commits a murder and a rape then quickly returns home and transforms back into Groves. When Dr. Harkness finds evidence to incriminate Groves, he confronts the madman, who transforms again, kidnapping a woman and fleeing into the woods. Unfortunately for Groves, a second saber-tooth tiger, created by injecting a housecat with his own formula, tears him to pieces; transforming back to himself, he murmurs "It's better this way," as he dies.
This wearily routine variation on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was directed by E.A. Dupont, who once had a substantial reputation, based on his film Variety; his work here is indistinguishable from that of any standard low-budget hack. However, the dialogue by producers Aubrey Wisberg and Jack Pollexfen is, if nothing else, highly identifiable -- they wrote some of the most ponderous, hard-to-say lines in movie history. "All I can say," poor Robert Shayne has to say, "is that I cannot determine now which I admire less in you, your humor or your wit." The makeup transformations are weirdly elaborate, though the end result -- the Neanderthal Man himself -- is rendered by a standard rubber mask. The script is not only badly written, it's clumsily organized, with way too much time spent on the saber-tooth tiger, and very little, relatively speaking, on the menace of the title.
Intrigued, Ross heads up to the town, and meets Ruth Marshall (Dorris Merrick), Groves' fiancee, who has him drive her to the Groves home. Groves himself becomes furious when a group of Los Angeles scientists refuse to believe his theory that Neanderthal Man had a larger brain than human beings today. He stays furious when he meets Harkness, and when the game warden and Ross kill the saber-tooth tiger, he's initially still angry -- but is in a better mood when the body proves to have vanished. ~ All Movie Guide

Saga of Hemp Brown gets under way when the title character (Rory Calhoun) is court-martialed and booted from the Cavalry. Brown is accused of permitting his men to walk into a deadly ambush; he knows he's innocent, and he spends the rest of the picture tracking down the real culprit. Joining a travelling medicine show, Brown falls in love with pretty snake-oil peddler Mona Langley (Beverly Garland). She is instrumental in helping Brown corner the mastermind behind the ambush (whose identity must remain secret in this paragraph). As a western, Saga of Hemp Brown is more of the same; the film's greatest strength is the unstressed rapport between stars Rory Calhoun and Beverly Garland. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Once seen in childhood, the January 1, 1960 Twilight Zone episode "The Four of Us Are Dying" can never be forgotten. Set in a surrealistic New York City (replete with flashing neon signs and forced-perspective streets), the story concerns one Arch Hammer (Harry Townes), a two-bit hood gifted with the ability to change his facial features. In rapid succession, he assumes the personalities of two recently deceased individuals -- jazz musician Johnny Foster (Ross Martin) and murdered gangster Virgil Sterig (Phillip Pine) -- for his own financial and sexual gain. But Arch comes to grief when, pursued by Sterig's killers, he transforms his face into that of punkish prizefighter Andy Marshak (Don Gordon). Enchancing the episode's dramatic clout is a brilliant performance by Beverly Garland as a nightclub singer and a driving musical score by Jerry Goldsmith. "The Four of Us Are Dying" was written by Rod Serling from a story by George Clayton Johnson. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Weekend Nun was an unsold TV pilot film based on the life and career of Louisiana nun Sister Fabian (real name: Joyce Duco). Joanna Pettet stars as Sister Mary Damien (aka: Marjorie Walker), who on weekdays holds down a job as a probation officer (she even packs a gun). The schism between the outside world and Sister Fabian's religious calling is brought sharply into focus when tragedy strikes. Vic Morrow costars as the sister's probation department associate, while Ann Sothern appears as the head nun. The real Sister Fabian/Joyce Duco, who had left the Order long before this film was made, acted as technical adviser on Weekend Nun. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this detective drama set in Hollywood, a private investigator uses logic to solve the murder of a famous mystery writer. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

In the last of his four western programmers for Allied Artists, Wayne Morris plays frontiersman Jim Bisby. Mistaken for a notorious gunslinger, Jim is appointed deputy sheriff of a wide-open cattle town. Playing along, our hero gets down to business -- and by the time his true identity is revealed, it hardly matters, since most of the bad guys are pushing up daisies on boot hill. Beverly Garland turns in another exceptional performance as the heroine, while Morris Ankrum, Roy Barcroft and I. Stanford Jolley fulfill their usual responsibilities. Two Guns and a Badge is of historical interest as the very last "B"-grade "series" western ever produced in Hollywood. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Based on the novel by Wilson Rawls, this film follows the events that befall a young Oklahoma farm boy as he, with the help of his two beloved hounds, struggles to help his family get by in the hard times of the 1930s. ~ Iotis Erlewine, All Movie Guide