The Hunchback of Notre Dame Reviews

The fourth and most spectacular silent version of Victor Hugo's classic story Notre-Dame de Paris made Lon Chaney a major star. Quasimodo (Lon Chaney), Notre Dame Cathedral's horribly deformed bell ringer, is elected king of the Festival of Fools by the people of Paris. After the festivities, Quasimodo's lustful and villainous master, Jehan (Brandon Hurst), orders the hunchback to abduct Esmeralda (Patsy Ruth Miller), a beautiful gypsy girl. The kidnapping is thwarted by Phoebus (Norman Kerry), a dashing young captain of the guards, and Quasimodo is arrested. After the hunchback is publicly whipped for his attempted abduction of the gypsy girl, she takes pity on him and brings him water. A meeting takes place between Esmeralda and Phoebus, who have fallen in love. While she is telling him that she has decided to take the veil, Jehan appears and stabs his rival, a crime for which Esmeralda is arrested. Despite her protestations that Jehan is the true culprit, she is tortured into confessing and sentenced to death by hanging. Moments before Esmeralda is to be executed, Quasimodo snatches her and rushes her into the bosom of the cathedral, where she is entitled to temporary sanctuary. The thieves and rabble of Paris arrive at the doors of Notre Dame to liberate Esmeralda but are kept at bay by the hunchback, who bombards them with stone blocks and molten lead. When Jehan arrives in the bell tower to seize the girl for himself, he and Quasimodo battle and Jehan is thrown to his death on the streets below. Phoebus, who has recovered from his stabbing, arrives to embrace and claim his beloved Esmeralda. After tolling the bell for the last time, the hunchback succumbs to the knife wounds he has sustained in his fight with Jehan. A studio that hitherto had produced nothing other than routine genre pictures, Universal boasted spending over a million dollars on THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, though not everyone believed them. No one could argue, however, that the studio had skimped on the construction of sets or the hiring of extras. Taking his cue from Hugo's detailed description of the hunchback, Chaney submitted himself to one of the most gruesome and complex makeup jobs ever seen on the screen. In the words of Hugo: "He looked like a giant who had been broken to pieces and ill soldered together." Nor did Chaney neglect the nonphysical aspects of Hugo's portrait, capturing Quasimodo's "formidable air of strength, agility, and courage" and facial expression comprised of equal parts of "spite, wonder, and melancholy." Practically everybody was impressed with the results, not all of them favorably. Variety's reviewer described the movie as "a two-hour nightmare. It's murderous, hideous and repulsive." Chaney went on to superstar in 20 more films before his death in 1930; among them: THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1925)--a more durable film than HUNCHBACK--and HE WHO GETS SLAPPED (1924), in which he gave the best (relatively) straight performance of his career. THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME's key narrative devices are rescue and abduction--hardly a scene goes by without A attempting to get B either out of C's clutches or into his own. Quasimodo abducts Esmeralda twice--once, unsuccessfully, for evil purposes and once, successfully, out of gratitude and love. Additionally, Phoebus rescues Esmeralda from Quasimodo; Esmeralda saves Gringoire, a troubadour, from being lynched by a kangaroo court; the rabble attempts to free Esmeralda from Notre Dame; and, climactically, Quasimodo wrests Esmeralda from the clutches of Jehan. An adequate but, apart from Chaney's contribution, hardly inspired adaptation of the Hugo classic, HUNCHBACK might have been more fluid and memorable if it had been made by a more imaginative director a few years later, at the end and peak of the silent era. RKO's 1939 remake was an improvement, thanks in part to Charles Laughton's more sympathetic portrayal of the title character. (Violence.)