| | Different movies are legendary for different reasons, and The Silver Chalice has its special place in film history: it's the picture Paul Newman tried to laugh off throughout his career. In his film debut, Newman plays a young artist raised in comfort but then bonded into slavery in the Roman Empire, where he gets a shot at creating a chalice for a sacred cup used by Jesus (crucified 20 years earlier). The strange cast includes Virginia Mayo as an exotic vixen, Pier Angeli as Newman's sweet, sincere Christian adorer, Joseph Wiseman as an anti-Christian plotter, and best of all Jack Palance, as a magician called upon to become the new Jesus. (For a climactic scene Palance dresses in a caped, skintight red costume, looking for all the world like the Riddler in a different color palate.) If this doesn't begin to convey the film's craziness, consider that the great art director Boris Leven opted for sets that are mostly stylized in the stark, spare manner of a 1950s Roadrunner-Coyote cartoon, a wild design that makes the movie look more like a stage opera than a lived-in film. Newman has a deer-in-the-headlights expression that suggests he knows he's made a terrible mistake, but there's nothing to do but say the dialogue anyway. In the 1960s, Newman took out newspaper ads urging people not to watch The Silver Chalice when it was broadcast on TV, and the film was something of a punch line for him thereafter. Little did he suspect how entertaining the film is for "bad movie night," or that it inspires hope for anybody whose career begins in a less-than-stellar way. --Robert Horton More...
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