Michael_Elliott The Silver Chalice (1954) * (out of 4)Really bad "epic" about a Greek slave (Paul Newman) who is asked to make the cup of Christ as well as sculpt the faces of his disciples. The film also follows his connection to Helena (Virginia Mayo), a former slave girl who now works for a magician (Jack Palance) who is going around trying to get followers like Jesus did.THE SILVER CHALICE is best remembered for a Variety ad that Paul Newman took out after he got famous and apologized for not only his performance in this film but also the film itself. Of course, doing something like this is only going to get people interested in the film so I'm sure many people have watched this because of Newman's plea for you not to. There's no doubt about it that Newman should have been embarrassed but he's certainly not the only one as this is certainly one of the worst films of its type.There are all sorts of problems with this but I think the biggest is the fact that they tried to pass this off as an epic. Obviously the filmmakers were trying to cash in on the various epics that were making a killing at the box office but there's just no proof of talent here. For starters, the story itself is rather boring and the two stories just don't mix well together. Even worse is how deadly boring the film is and how it drags throughout the long running time. Throw in some bad dialogue and you've got the occasional laughter. You've even got some really bad looking sets that are obviously built on a soundstage.Even worse are the performances. Having seen the majority of Newman's work there's no question that this here was his worst performance. You can also tell that he had no direction and he's constantly all over the screen and not seeming to know where to turn or how to say a line. Mayo is also just as bad but she seems to be sleepwalking more than anything. Palance doesn't give a "good" performance but it's so campy at times that you can't help but be entertained by it. Everyone else from bit players to extras are all over-the-top and just not very good.THE SILVER CHALICE at least has the benefit of being called one of the worst of its kind. Outside some nice cinematography there's really not much here outside the camp value.

atlasmb I started watching "The Silver Chalice" without having read any reviews. It did not take long for this highly stylized presentation to annoy me. I think I lasted about 30 minutes.First, it employs minimalist sets which, in themselves, are sometimes beautiful but, when combined with the stylized delivery of dialogue are distracting.The dialogue is stilted and silly. And the actors were obviously directed to deliver it in a somewhat emotionless way. Don't feel too bad for Natalie Wood, who would soon have "Rebel Without a Cause" to counteract the effect of "The Silver Chalice".And Paul Newman, in his film debut, would soon have "Somebody Up There Likes Me". How sad that he passed up "East of Eden" for this drivel.This film is hokey and almost without any merit. I did find Jack Palance's performance (what little I saw) to be realistic enough to enjoy. But he could not provide enough magic to bring this boring film to life.

MarieGabrielle This film is certainly an oddity but deserves some mention for the actors involved, and especially Jack Palance as "Simon the Magician".I too remember watching this around Easter at around age 10, it could be an interesting film for children who don't understand the historical issues of Emperor Nero,the Romans and conflicts of Christianity etc.As another reviewer mentioned, it is odd with unusual sets. Virginia Mayo, however, looks lovely as always, even with some over the top eyebrow makeup and gold eyeshadow.Paul Newman is a slave who must craft a special chalice for Jesus. Mayo, as royalty attempts to rescue him from his chains. Simon the Magician entertains Caesar but loses his mind in the end, building a special tower and wings to prove to Caesar that he can fly. He is just as much a God as any other, he proclaims.The film is theater and a bit campy as you get older but worth watching as a curiosity. 6/10

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