Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Pluskylang Great Film overall

Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

HotToastyRag Whoever saw through this B-movie and cast Paul Newman in his next role in Somebody Up There Likes Me deserves a medal. The Silver Chalice was Newman's first film role, after only a few television credits. He knew how stinky the movie was, so I don't feel bad in criticizing it.In an attempt to copy the success of The Robe, another biblical epic was made. Only, instead of casting people who could actually pull off a period piece (Richard Burton and Jean Simmons), this film starred Paul Newman and Virginia Mayo. The film plays off like a bad community theater dress rehearsal, and don't even get me started on Mayo's crazy eye makeup! Save yourselves. Even if you like biblical movies, the 1950s produced so many others you can watch besides this one. Watch Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, The Robe, or Quo Vadis. Just don't watch The Silver Chalice. I'm sorry, but with the crummy script, make-up, and acting, no one wants to sit through two and a half hours about a man trying to sculpt a chalice with the faces of Jesus and his disciples on it, and a bunch of bad guys trying to steal it.

mark.waltz This movie is famous (or in-famous) for Paul Newman taking out an advertisement to ask people NOT to watch this on TV when it had its first network showing. I say watch it, because this is one of the best biblical comedies of all time, that is, until Mel Brooks gave us "History of the World Part I". And any film where Natalie Wood grows up to be Virginia Mayo can't be serious, as in "Shirley you can't be serious" and "Give me Virginia ham on one, hold the mayo."Newman comes off rather unscathed in this post-Jesus era epic (20 years after the Crucifixion) about a Greek Slave, Basil (Newman), who is sought by one of the surviving apostles (Luke) to create a silver chalice to hold the cup that Jesus drank from on the last night. Basil has rather a soap operatic history; He was adopted by a wealthy Greek with no heirs whose evil brother has no desire to give up any of the family estate to the son of a peasant. Basil is made a slave, but his reputation as a sculptor becomes well known, and before his evil uncle can have him killed to avoid future troubles, he is off to fulfill his own destiny.It all sounds fine, but the execution of how it is pulled off is one of Hollywood's greatest mysteries. Some extremely hammy performances by Virginia Mayo (forgive the pun) and Jack Palance (giving one of the best drag performances in film history!) add to the unintentional laughter. I can't believe this could ever be completed because how these actors can get past saying these lines without constantly cracking up is beyond me. Add on some rather strange looking set design that would probably work better in 3-D, and you have the most bizarre biblical epic ever made. Mayo, complete with really bizarre eye makeup that would have sent Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra barging the wrong way down the Nile, is one of the oddest femme fatales in a Biblical epic. And Jack Palance is so bizarre as the insane Caligula like magician Simon that you expect him to start doing one-handed push-ups while wearing his Riddler outfit for the final scene.

writers_reign For years all I knew about this turkey was that when it played on TV in the US Paul Newman paid for a full-page ad in the press urging fans not to see it. Boy, did he get it right. They really need a new category for this which can only be described as a Turkey's Turkey. Apparently no American director wanted to film it, even Bruce Humberstone didn't want to be caught dead behind the bullhorn on this one, so they got Victor Saville, a limey who shot several Jessie Mathews vehicles in the early thirties. The ploy, if you can call it that, centers around our old friend the Holy Grail with Paul Newman - in his first At Bat on the big screen, although he had been appearing on television for several years - playing a gifted Greek sculptor who is tapped to fashion a receptacle worthy of containing the Holy Grail. The action moves between Antioch, Jerusalem and Rome or, to put it another way, from Sound Stage #3 to Sound Stage #5 on the Warner lot in Burbank, because all the locations look the same. There's an interesting cast list, mostly wasted talents, including Ian Wolfe, Joseph Wiseman and Lorne Green but Jack Palance walks away with it - and he's welcome to it - as the magician who believes his own hype. I was barely able to sit through it but what do I know.

James Hitchcock The historical epics which were so popular in the fifties and early sixties frequently had a religious theme. Some were based, not always faithfully, on stories from the Bible ("The Ten Commandments", "Solomon and Sheba", "Esther and the King"), while others tried to convey a Christian message indirectly. Thus the central character of "Spartacus" is treated as a metaphorical Christ-figure, and "The Egyptian" draws parallels between Christianity and the monotheistic religion of Atenism which briefly flourished under the heretical Pharaoh Akhnaten. "The Silver Chalice" is one of a number of films which deal with the early days of the Christian church and its persecution by the Roman emperors. The stories told by such films were normally fictitious, but were set against a background of historical fact. The most famous film of this type is "Ben Hur", but others include "The Robe" and its sequel "Demetrius and the Gladiators", "Quo Vadis?" and "The Fall of the Roman Empire".The plot of "The Silver Chalice" is essentially similar to that of "The Robe", which was made the previous year. Both concerned a sacred relic of Christ which is being sought by the enemies of Christianity. In "The Robe" this relic is the robe which Christ wore at His crucifixion; in "The Silver Chalice" it is the cup which He used at the Last Supper. (This cup has become known as the Holy Grail, especially in the context of the Arthurian legends, but this name is not used in the film).The central character is Basil, a young Greek craftsman from Antioch who is wrongly sold into slavery, rescued by Saint Luke, and commissioned by him to make a silver chalice to house the sacred cup. The chalice is to have the faces of the disciples and Jesus himself sculpted around its rim, and Basil travels to Jerusalem and to Rome to complete this task. The cup, however, is being sought by Simon Magus, the villain of the story, who hopes to found his own religion and who uses conjuring tricks in an attempt to convince people that he is the new Messiah. The film also deals with Basil's relationships with two women, the pagan prostitute Helena, who is also Simon's mistress, and the Christian convert Deborah, the granddaughter of Joseph of Arimathea."The Silver Chalice" was Paul Newman's first film, but seldom can someone who went on to become a major star have made so unpromising a debut. Newman is totally wooden and unconvincing; there is no hint here of the great actor he was to become only a few years later. He himself apparently loathed the film; when it was later broadcast on television in 1966, he is said to have taken out an advertisement in a Hollywood trade paper apologising for his performance, and asking people not to watch it. Predictably, this achieved precisely the opposite of what he was hoping for; his advertisement aroused interest in the film and the broadcast received unusually high ratings. He even allegedly called the film "the worst motion picture produced during the 1950s", even though this was the decade that brought us the likes of Ed Wood's "Plan 9 from Outer Space".To be fair to him, his is by no means the only below par acting performance in the film. Probably the best comes from Jack Palance, a splendidly over-the-top villain as Simon, and the teenage Natalie Wood is charming as Helena in the days when she was still an innocent young slave-girl. Virginia Mayo, however, her good looks hidden behind some weird make-up, fails to make the older Helena sufficiently seductive or alluring. Pier Angeli looks lovely as Deborah, but her acting is hampered by her thick foreign accent.The acting is not the only problem with the film. It is overlong, the plot is often confusing, and the dialogue frequently has the artificial, stilted flavour common to many Biblical epics. (The scriptwriters seem to have imagined that a film on a religious theme needed to be written in something resembling the language of the King James Bible). The stylised, minimalist set designs would be more suited to a modernist theatrical production than they would to a major feature film; this sort of Brechtian minimalism seems particularly inappropriate in an epic, a genre which has always relied on visual splendour.One reviewer says that the film is "no worse than numerous other Biblical epics", but in my experience epics vary greatly in quality. "The Silver Chalice" is not only inferior to the classics of the genre ("The Ten Commandments", "Ben-Hur", "Spartacus") but also to second-division examples such as "The Egyptian" or "Demetrius and the Gladiators". I would even rank it lower than mediocre third-raters like "Samson and Delilah" or "Esther and the King". About the only one it can compare with is that dreadful John Wayne vehicle "The Conqueror". It is perhaps appropriate that the hero of this fourth-rate film is called Basil. "The Silver Chalice" is to epic movies what Fawlty Towers is to hotels. 4/10