Friday, December 9, 2016

By the Gods!

Virginia Mayo and Paul Newman in THE SILVER CHALICE

Notorious PEPLUM film, even 60+ years after its release. Paul Newman hated it and even printed an ad in a newspaper decrying the film's quality before its initial TV broadcast. It's not really good but  it is visually interesting. I don't mean it's succeeds in what they tried to do with the look of it all but at least they tried something different.

3 comments:

Richard Svensson said...

The only character I really cared about in this film was Jack Palance's Simon the magician. He was especially resplandent in his black-sperms-on-red tights, worn while taking his big dive for his conviction.

Michael O'Sullivan said...

It really impressed me as a kid, as it looked so odd. Palance was fantastic as Simon the magician who thinks he can fly, and a blonde Natalie Wood grows up to be Virigina Mayo with that odd eyemakeup!

Scott Ochiltree said...

Virginia Mayo was cute, but there is no getting around the fact that this was one of the worst ever Hollywood Peplums.

Peplums were just not a good fit for Warner Brothers. HELEN OF TROY is an example of lavish production values and perfectly decent acting that flopped at the US box office for Warner.