Beverly Garland Movies

Produced by Roger Corman, Gunslinger stars Corman's then-sweetheart Beverly Garland as tough lady-marshal Rose Hood. Dance-hall girl Erica Page (Allison Hayes), Rose's bitterest enemy, hires gunslinger Cane Miro (John Ireland) to bump off the marshal. When he falls in love with Rose, Cane is faced with the most delicate dilemma in his entire murderous career. Cheaply made, Gunslinger has a raw, dusty integrity often lacking in more expensive westerns. The best scenes involve the confrontations between Beverly Garland and Allison Hayes, two of the most fearsome females ever captured on celluloid. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this jungle adventure, two explorers travel deep within the mysterious, dangerous Amazon in search of medicinal herbs, used for head-shrinking by the natives, that could used in the treatment of cancer patients. During their arduous trek, the two slowly fall in love. Meanwhile a plantation owner tries to figure out why his workers are leaving in droves and going back to the jungles. He learns that they are being terrorized by a gigantic, hungry bird. Fortunately, things are not as they seem as the explorers soon find out. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Hot on the heels of Warner Bros.' New York Confidential came Columbia's New Orleans Uncensored. Lensed in semi-documentary fashion by future horror maven William Castle, the film stars Arthur Franz as New Orleans dockworker Dan Corbett. Attempting to remain honest, Corbett runs afoul of crime kingpin Zero Saxon (Michael Ansara), who controls the dockworkers union and runs a smuggling operation on the side. When his best friend is killed by Saxon's goons, Corbett agrees to cooperate with the authorities in bringing the racketeer to justice. As a means of "balancing" the picture, several real-life New Orleans civic leaders and union heads--all with purportedly clean records--appear as themselves. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Having forsaken westerns for detective melodramas in Dial Red O, William "Wild Bill" Ellliot continues in this vein in Sudden Danger. Elliot is cast as detective lieutenant Doyle, who at present is investigating the alleged suicide of a clothing manufacturer. Doyle suspects that the victim was murdered, and that the perpetrator was the dead man's blind son, Curtis (Tom Drake). Hoping to clear himself, Curtis begins searching for clues on his own, and by fadeout time he and Doyle have cornered the actual killer. Though obviously made in a hurry, Sudden Danger is elevated by better-than-usual scripting and a well-chosen supporting cast. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Neither a B nor an A picture, Bitter Creek is a solid western programmer, offering an excellent, unglamorized performance by Wild Bill Elliot. Though officially prohibited to do so by the Production Code, the film is motivated by revenge. Elliot arrives in Bitter Creek seeking retribution for the murders of his brothers. He suspects that powerful rancher Carleton Young is responsible, but has no proof. In the course of events, Elliot behaves with the same cold-blooded ruthlessness as the villains, with no concessions made to the kids in the audience: this, of course, results in a far more powerful film than usual. Beverly Garland is well cast as the vacillating heroine who believes in Young's innocence until it's almost too late. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this adventure Bomba the Jungle boy helps a Hollywood movie star search the dark, dangerous jungle for her missing husband. As they search, they encounter a man-eating leopard. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

The strangest aspect of the low-budget fantasy effort The Rocket Man is the fact that one of its screenwriters was Lenny Bruce. There's nothing scatalogical or even satirical in the film itself, however. Essentially an Andy Hardyesque comedy drama with a peripheral sci-fi slant, the story concerns a lonely orphan boy named Timmy (George "Foghorn" Winslow) who receives a toy ray gun for Christmas. Only it isn't a toy, but the genuine article, dropped off by a friendly spaceman. Whenever Timmy shoots the gun at someone, the rays cause the "victim" to speak nothing but the truth. The gun comes in handy when the villain of the piece (Emory Parnell) tries to evict the orphans. Timmy also uses the weapon to expedite the romance of nominal leads Anne Francis and John Agar. Also appearing in Rocket Man are Spring Byington and Charles Coburn, who'd previously been felicitously teamed in Louisa (1950). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this Miami-set crime drama, a secret society of residents united against the ever-encroaching Mafia, hire a reform mobster to help them stop the violence by exposing the Mafia to public scrutiny. ~ Sandra Brennan, 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

A drama from the early television series: "A Measure of Faith." ~ All Movie Guide

"I want to report a murder...mine." So begins D.O.A. Told in flashback, the story tells of how vacationing CPA Frank Bigelow (Edmond O'Brien) becomes the recipient of a deadly poison known as iridium. Told by a doctor that he hasn't long to live, Bigelow desperately retraces his movements of the previous 24 hours, trying to locate his murderer. Through the aid of his secretary Paula Gibson (Pamela Britton) (who doesn't know of her employer's imminent demise), Bigelow traces a shipment of iridium to a gang of criminals who've used the poison in the commission of a crime. But for much of the film, it remains unclear why Bigelow himself was targeted. Though we know from the outset that Bigelow isn't long for this world, the film builds up an incredible amount of suspense towards the end, when Bigelow is taken "for a ride" by a psychopath (Neville Brand). with a penchant for pummeling his victims in the belly. DOA was remade in 1988 with Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide