The Hunchback of Notre Dame Review & Ratings

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The Hunchback of Notre Dame Review

Even granting my utter lack of objectivity in evaluating this Hunchback after knowing it for 45 years (during which I must have seen it close to 50 times, including two viewings in the past two weeks), it remains brilliant in every respect. Laughton's performance remains unmatched and the gold standard for Quasimodo interpreters. The 19-year-old Maureen O'Hara is as fresh and lovely and humane as in my earliest recollections. Sir Cedric Hardwick (an apt handle for the Jean Frollo character, no?) is a perfect, pinched-nostril'd villain. RKO's production values are second to none, and Joseph August's photography (coupled to Dieterle's film sensibility and scene framing, so touched by German cinematic impressionism) is absolute perfection. So too is the heralded Alfred Newman score, perhaps the finest marriage of musical phrase to filmed sequence to that point in film history--swellingly Wagnerian at emotional highpoints, but lean, linear, and distinctly 15th-16th century when period atmosphere is called for (listen for Tielmann Susato and other renaissance masters, skillfully woven in).
But, in the end, it's Laughton and Paris and the brilliantly recreated cathedral that stand at the picture's center. Unspeakably beautiful and, in the end, unbearably heartbreaking.
The DVD transfer, however, is something of a disappointment--only three stars for its quality, particularly in the first reel. But don't get me wrong--it's more than simply "watchable" and looks as good as anything else from the period you you might run across on TCM; it improves from the picture's middle third on, and the sound is fine. The DVD extras are extremely valuable for recounting many production details; indeed, what I had always thought to be spectacularly wrought matte shots were, I learned in the included production documentary, a 5-acre recreation of 15th century Paris, designed from old woodcuts and drawings. (The otherwise fine documentary sadly omits all mention of cinematographer August, who shot a number of pictures--Gunga Din, They Were Expendable, The Informer, The Devil and Daniel Webster--that are as often remembered for their distinctive "look" and as for their "film classic" status.) And the Maureen O'Hara interview, for those of us who grew up smitten with her, is a sheer delight--more than a half-century later and as flashing and beautiful as ever.
Film buffs make a big to-do over 1939 as "Hollywood's Greatest Year." Everyone else will agree once they get a load of the filmography of 1939 that's included here as an extra. It's just a list, but what a list.
Permesso...a biographical aside: Dieterle's Hunchback, which holds a special place in my heart for a variety of reasons, but especially because it led directly to twin additions: to books, and to movies. As a little boy, my love for this story story naturally led me to read my first adult "chapter book"--a 35 cent Bantam translation of the Hugo novel. I've been book-addicted ever since, transposing my library browsing to the adult stacks and leapfrogging the entire body of classic juvenile literature that I eventually wound up reading to my own children. And movie-addicted, too--also as a boy, I hunted down the Lon Chaney Hunchback in a NYC repertory film house, saw the (inferior) Tony Quinn version in the theater, and since have seen, I suppose, every subsequent remake. And I also saw almost all of those wonderful 1939 pictures, mostly on Million Dollar Movie, the old NY WOR program that showed a movie about 16 times a week (twice a week day and three times a day on weekends).
Generally, a movie held as dearly in memory as I have held this simply cannot doesn't sustain its recalled impact on re-viewing--it may seem dated, or trite, or visually uncompelling, emotionally vapid, saccharine, etc., to a contemporary film lover. But the Dieterle/Laughton Hunchback remains an indispensable film, here presented in an outstanding package, and at a bargain price.

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