While reassessing the much-maligned THE SILVER CHALICE (1954) recently, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of deja vu at that particular point in the movie where Christian convert Pier Angeli enters the frame carrying a studded leather box bearing the cup from which Christ drank at at the so-called Last Supper on Mount Zion.  Forget the religious and historic significance of this revelation – this Morlock fairly barked “Hey, that’s the leather box from…

… KISS ME DEADLY (1955)!”  I mean, it’s not the same box, of course – it’s not even an exact match but it is boxy and leathery and sinister-looking and what’s more…

… the contents of the box glows.  This simple special effect was, of course, intended by the filmmakers to stand for proof positive of divine intervention within a narrative concerned with Christians safeguarding The Holy Grail some 20 years after Christ’s crucifixion against the Pagan opposition and the decadence of the Roman colonialists.  But of course, my secular mind goes right to the fact that …

… the contents of the leather box in KISS ME DEADLY glows, too, but that there’s nothing heavenly about its radiance.  (A legendary reveal, this gag has been copied by such films as REPO MAN and PULP FICTION, as was spoofed on the animated TV series THE SIMPSONS.) In a plot point not original to the Mickey Spillane novel on which this Robert Aldrich film was based, this leather box contains atomic secrets, or rather their raw materials – the “Great Whatzit” that has all of the Los Angeles underworld in a lather to possess it.  The similarities between this bracing and forward-looking thriller with the Cinemascope Biblical epic made a year earlier are fairly remarkable, with THE SILVER CHALICE even being structured somewhat like a film noir – the film begins with its hero (Paul Newman) betrayed and sold into slavery, only to return older, wiser and angry, like a noir antihero paroled from prison or back from the war with a chip on his shoulder.  Later, Newman’s “Basil of Antioch” goes on the lam with a pretty girl, taking out Roman centurions and sprinting over rooftops like a character out of a “doomed lovers on the run” drama such as YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE (1937), THEY LIVE BY NIGHT (1948) or GUN CRAZY (1950).

In both films, the protagonist finds himself poised between two equally desirable women: one brunette and on the side of the angels and the other blonde and to some degree bad to the bone.

Of course, the blonde is more fun but we know not to trust her.  In THE SILVER CHALICE, the Holy Grail relies on the viewer’s familiarity with the story of Christ’s passion and his command to his disciples the night of his arrest to drink from his cup “… in memory of me.”  In KISS ME DEADLY, tough guy Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) has a run-in at the top of the film with a mysterious woman whose whispered imperative “Remember me” will haunt him right up until the revelation of the big secret.

THE SILVER CHALICE ends with all hell breaking loose in Rome, the villain destroyed, and hero and heroine setting off to sea toward a brighter future.  In the final frames of KISS ME DEADLY, hero and heroine also head for the ocean but not for a sea voyage…

… instead scrambling in a blind panic to escape an atomic explosion that will change the shape of the known world forever.  THE SILVER CHALICE and KISS ME DEADLY share other similarities.  Actors Albert Dekkar, Strother Martin and Paul Richards make appearances in both.  Dekkar is a Christian hero in the former and the Big Bad Guy of the latter but Martin plays family men and Richards a henchman in both.  (It’s interesting, if not especially relevant, that prior to their working on either of these films Paul Newman and Ralph Meeker were cast opposite one another in the original Broadway production of PICNIC).  THE SILVER CHALICE‘s director, Victor Saville, came to this project after helming THE LONG WAIT (1954), another adaptation of a Mickey Spillane.  And at the end of THE SILVER CHALICE, Lorne Green (as Peter the Apostle) has a speech that warns of a future of “great cities and mighty bridges and towers higher than the tower of Babel… a world of evil and long, bitter wars… when man holds lightning in his hands.”

Sounds an awful lot like Mike Hammer’s beat, doesn’t it – at least as etched by KISS ME DEADLY.  If my mind was predisposed to conspiracy theories, I might think there was something at play here beyond artistic coincidence… but I think all it is really is proof of all that is magic and, dare I say it, miraculous about the movies.