Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers is a 1980 documentary film about garlic directed by Les Blank. Its official premiere was at the 1980 Berlin Film Festival.
Production
It was filmed at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California, as well as in other locations in Northern California. The director recommends that, when the film is shown, a toaster oven containing several heads of garlic be turned on in the rear of the theater, unbeknownst to the audience, with the intended result that approximately halfway through the showing the entire theater will be filled with the smell of garlic.
The title is a shortened form of the saying "Garlic is as good as ten mothers... for keeping the girls away."
Reception and legacy
Robert Taylor for the Oakland Tribune called the film "an intoxicating mixture of food and music, serious and comic styles."
In 2004, the film was selected for preservation in the United States' National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." The Academy Film Archive preserved Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers in 1999.
In Blank's 1982 film Burden of Dreams, a documentary chronicling the filming of Fitzcarraldo, director Werner Herzog and other crew members can be seen wearing "Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers" T-shirts.
See also
- All in This Tea
References
External links
- Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers at IMDb
- Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers at the TCM Movie Database
- Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers page from Les Blank site
- Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers essay by Daniel Eagan in America's Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry, A&C Black, 2010 ISBN 0826429777, pages 763-764 [1]
