‘The Silver Chalice’: A movie so bad that Paul Newman apologised in the paper
When most movie stars get the growing sense they’ve just wrapped filming on a flop, they tend to keep quiet about it. Defending your role in an objectively bad film is a surefire way to attract more criticism; just ask the cast of Cats. But following his role as Basil in The Silver Chalice, Paul Newman couldn’t keep quiet. He was so horrified by his Hollywood debut that he embarked on a damage control mission, inadvertently boosting the sales of the film and the advertising profits of several newspapers in the process.
While he’s now lauded for his roles in The Hustler and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, his involvement in Victor Saville’s historical epic haunted him. His portrayal of a Greek artist charged with adorning the cup of Christ was actually received fairly warmly upon its 1954 release, but it didn’t stop Newman from calling it “god-awful“.
“Paul Newman apologises every night this week – Channel 9,” declared a series of panicked adverts in 1963. A Los Angeles television channel had dredged up all the trauma of his early Silver Chalice role by showing it every night for a week, so he purchases adverts in Hollywood trade papers by way of an apology. Carla Valderrama, author of This Was Hollywood, wrote that he considered the string of adverts a “community service” to stop audiences from watching the film.
Naturally, it had the exact opposite effect and massively boosted ratings. Years before PR geniuses were thinking up celebrity endorsements and having Nicole Kidman tell us all about the magic of the silver screen, Newman reminded everyone of how fun it was to watch a bad movie.
Still, his campaign against The Silver Chalice was far from over, writing in his autobiography Paul Newman: A Life that he was both “horrified” and traumatised” when he first watched it. “I was sure my acting career had begun and ended with the same picture,” he fretted. “It’s kind of a distinction to say I was in the worst film to be made in the entirety of the 1950s.”
You’d be forgiven for thinking that as the years went on, Newman might have made peace with it. However, in 1994, now decades after its release, he still couldn’t let it go. “That I survived that picture is a testament to something,” he told New York magazine. “All I had in that movie were those short cocktail dresses. Nero [Jacques Aubuchon] got to wear all the long stuff with the beads. My legs aren’t exactly my best feature.”
Hilariously, his persistent attempts to distance himself from the film linked him with it for decades. While other roles and an Oscar came afterwards, there was something about his debut appearance that he’d never quite move on from.
