GamerTab That was an excellent one.

Titreenp SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Ploydsge just watch it!

Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

kirbyskay2012 I saw this movie on TV in the early 1960s the first time. It is a mishmash of both good and bad, and is still watchable for a number of reasons. The Silver Chalice must have had a miserable production budget because some of the sets are ludicrously cheap, one set in particular (a stone wall) looked like it was drawn onto cardboard using a black permanent marker with a yardstick. So hilariously funny that it completely made me forget what was happening in that scene!And, speaking of hilarious, Jack Palance's performance was over-the-top total high camp. It was never clear if this was a deliberate move on the part of the director or producer or just an actor's ploy to steal every scene in which he appeared in this film. Not too far behind was the performance of Virginia Mayo, as his "magician's assistant", whose obvious job duties included prostitution as well. I think this was Palance's all time best performance, if only for the preposterous overacting. His Mickey Mouse Sorcerer's Apprentice costume and hairdo certainly did not contribute to a serious character role!Paul Newman was just really starting his career in movies, although he had chalked up a lot of time and experience in theatrical plays. He mainly seemed uninvolved in his character's role, and uncomfortable in the movie in general. He has been quoted several times that this was the one production that he wanted to purchase all possible copies of since he regretted this role more than any other. Not really bad, but he was probably suffering from the difference between live acting on a theatre stage vs a movie set. The script didn't help him out much.It was fun trying to identify the actors portraying supporting players in this convoluted story which was in reality fairly straightforward. It had the same overall cheesy and disjointed feeling of another overblown attempt by the old Hollywood Studio machine when it made another interesting stinker titled THE HISTORY OF MANKIND, which contained few starring roles, but a series of scenes populated by a cameos of a veritable Who's Who of Hollywood's plethora of film celebrities, mainly from the 1940s.I highly recommend both of these movies, if only to watch how the best of the film industry's intentions can go so publicly awry, regardless of casting and production efforts. Watch these two films and see how many famous actors and actresses you can pick out in the various scenes, while having a really fun and hilarious couple of hours along the way!

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.

Beam Me Up This movie avoids a flaw found in several other movies from the 1950s with a religious overtone, such as The Robe, Quo Vadis, and Samson and Delilah. Those movies unfortunately depicted all pagans or anybody who isn't a Jew or Christian as morally depraved and decadent.The Silver Chalice focuses well on the struggle and life of Basil. Meanwhile, it gives good attention to the movement that Simon the Magician is trying to build.There was actually a person named Simon Magus who challenged the "miracles" of Jesus. Not surprisingly, he was demonized by early Christian historians.The main flaw with the Silver Chalice is the movie set. Many other movies of the 1950s set in ancient times made a decent effort in designing their movie sets to duplicate dwellings as they might have existed in ancient times. The Silver Chalice movie set is very plain and shows that little effort was made in that regard, especially on the roof scene set in Jerusalem where Basil and Deborra are trying to escape from the mob and the Romans.

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