I confess I haven't read Victor Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris", which shouldn't qualify me as the best judge on the film because at least the makers did read it, but I guess my reaction is of a spectator who got the general idea about the themes and wanted to see them expressed through the magic of the camera. If the film could render the majesty of the cathedral's architecture (almost a century on the making), the destiny of a woman who inspired humanity within the 'beast' or inhumanity within the priest, and the whole subtext about the rising modern age, it could have been a triumph. Well, a failure, it's certainly not. Still...
It is very fitting that "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame" was released in the very year that changed the face of Europe for a much dramatic worse. The original story took place at the cusp of two historical ages, right after the medieval time where France was slowly recovering from centuries during which the people, mostly peasants, were kept at the mercy of plagues, wars and feudal rulers, and the time of the printing press and a few years before Columbus' discoveries. Renaissance was still in its infancy and the triumphant bells of Notre Dame resonated in the hearts of the population, more than any pamphlet produced by Guttenberg's little marvel...
And so while I was watching William Dieterle's film, I could get those 'end of an era' vibes as Old Europe was slowly surrendering to the ominous clicking boots of fascism, and during the climactic sequence where Quasimodo saves Esmeralda from execution and ask the people to wake up and cries "Sanctuary", it was one of these moments where a film makes one with its own context and become not much a product but a reflection of its time. For that moment only, I could get the same thrills running down my body like Chaplin delivering his speech in "The Great Dictator".
That said, it is also problematic that the film was released in what is arguably the best year of cinema, and in such a glorious company as movies like "The Wizard of Oz" or "Gone With the Wind" even a film that offer so beautiful and convincing set designs can suffer by comparison. The problem with "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" is that for all its effort to recreate the mood and the cathedral, its treatment of the story feels more uncertain and the characterization less rounded. And I guess the Hays Code had a lot to do with it because it weakened the character who makes or breaks a film.
The film's first pitfall is in the portrayal of Frollo, the archetypal devil in religious clothing entangled in a forbidden love. It is not that Cedric Hardwicke doesn't deliver a solid performance but he's too limited by a Code that couldn't allow a priest to be downright evil no matter how 'understandable' his reasons were. Therefore the film relies on a duality trick that brings a nice character on the story, the Archdeacon Claude Frollo (Walter Hampden) and his brother Jehann (Hardwicke), a villain by circumstances. Harry Davenport is Louis XI, the benevolent and open-minded king.
Now, "Notre Dame" has always been to me the tragedy of a man who was considered a monster by birth and had the misfortune to fall in love with a beautiful woman. While I would never dismiss the power of Charles Laughton's performance as Quasimodo, there are a few words to say. Reading trivia on how the deformity of Laughton was treated as a marketing trick (face hidden in the trailer) that was used even in the "Mask" film of 1985, I was less disappointed by Laughton's performance but on how so much efforts were put in uglying him (and it's quite an excellent job)- than the latitude given to him to raise above his ugliness.
The face of Quasimodo is so unique that it has an unexpected capability to distract you from the story, you don't see the character suffering, but you see how exhausting it must have been for Laughton to undergo such a transformation. The makeup is so good it steals out the depth of the character who's not given enough screentime to raise beyond his status as the local 'curiosity'. Don't get me wrong, he's got some great emotional moments but quite diluted in the narrative chaos.
Now Maureen O'Hara is one of my favorite Golden Age actresses, and that she doesn't look gypsy matters less than she doesn't have the street-smarts of a Bohemian vagrant who wouldn't be that terrorized by a face such as Quasimodo, nor fall in love with a second-rate Don Juan like Alan Marshal as Phoebius, nor being a damsel-in-distress in the arms of Cedric Hardwicke, not the fiery gal that stood tall against the Duke himself. She looks great on the screen though, so great there's a certain violence in making Quasimodo witness her going with Gringoire, of all the men. That might have hurt more than the whipping.
I'm a fan of Edmund O'Brien but his Gringoire seems rather misplaced, occupying the very screen-time that might have deepened Quasimodo or at the very least Phoebius. Thomas Mitchell does a fair job as Clopin, the King of the Miracles Court.
There's so many things worthy of the best production and blocksbusters that one wouldn't not consider the film as great entertainment but it tries so much to be an epic and a love story à la 'Beauty and the Beast' that it lacked one essential thing: a focus. I agree about a reviewer who commented that the crowds don't seem to act with consistency... the irony of the film is that while it denounces the regal stranglehold on the people, their fluctuating reactions toward 'Quasimodo' would make you wonder if it the cure wasn't worse than the evil...
It is very fitting that "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame" was released in the very year that changed the face of Europe for a much dramatic worse. The original story took place at the cusp of two historical ages, right after the medieval time where France was slowly recovering from centuries during which the people, mostly peasants, were kept at the mercy of plagues, wars and feudal rulers, and the time of the printing press and a few years before Columbus' discoveries. Renaissance was still in its infancy and the triumphant bells of Notre Dame resonated in the hearts of the population, more than any pamphlet produced by Guttenberg's little marvel...
And so while I was watching William Dieterle's film, I could get those 'end of an era' vibes as Old Europe was slowly surrendering to the ominous clicking boots of fascism, and during the climactic sequence where Quasimodo saves Esmeralda from execution and ask the people to wake up and cries "Sanctuary", it was one of these moments where a film makes one with its own context and become not much a product but a reflection of its time. For that moment only, I could get the same thrills running down my body like Chaplin delivering his speech in "The Great Dictator".
That said, it is also problematic that the film was released in what is arguably the best year of cinema, and in such a glorious company as movies like "The Wizard of Oz" or "Gone With the Wind" even a film that offer so beautiful and convincing set designs can suffer by comparison. The problem with "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" is that for all its effort to recreate the mood and the cathedral, its treatment of the story feels more uncertain and the characterization less rounded. And I guess the Hays Code had a lot to do with it because it weakened the character who makes or breaks a film.
The film's first pitfall is in the portrayal of Frollo, the archetypal devil in religious clothing entangled in a forbidden love. It is not that Cedric Hardwicke doesn't deliver a solid performance but he's too limited by a Code that couldn't allow a priest to be downright evil no matter how 'understandable' his reasons were. Therefore the film relies on a duality trick that brings a nice character on the story, the Archdeacon Claude Frollo (Walter Hampden) and his brother Jehann (Hardwicke), a villain by circumstances. Harry Davenport is Louis XI, the benevolent and open-minded king.
Now, "Notre Dame" has always been to me the tragedy of a man who was considered a monster by birth and had the misfortune to fall in love with a beautiful woman. While I would never dismiss the power of Charles Laughton's performance as Quasimodo, there are a few words to say. Reading trivia on how the deformity of Laughton was treated as a marketing trick (face hidden in the trailer) that was used even in the "Mask" film of 1985, I was less disappointed by Laughton's performance but on how so much efforts were put in uglying him (and it's quite an excellent job)- than the latitude given to him to raise above his ugliness.
The face of Quasimodo is so unique that it has an unexpected capability to distract you from the story, you don't see the character suffering, but you see how exhausting it must have been for Laughton to undergo such a transformation. The makeup is so good it steals out the depth of the character who's not given enough screentime to raise beyond his status as the local 'curiosity'. Don't get me wrong, he's got some great emotional moments but quite diluted in the narrative chaos.
Now Maureen O'Hara is one of my favorite Golden Age actresses, and that she doesn't look gypsy matters less than she doesn't have the street-smarts of a Bohemian vagrant who wouldn't be that terrorized by a face such as Quasimodo, nor fall in love with a second-rate Don Juan like Alan Marshal as Phoebius, nor being a damsel-in-distress in the arms of Cedric Hardwicke, not the fiery gal that stood tall against the Duke himself. She looks great on the screen though, so great there's a certain violence in making Quasimodo witness her going with Gringoire, of all the men. That might have hurt more than the whipping.
I'm a fan of Edmund O'Brien but his Gringoire seems rather misplaced, occupying the very screen-time that might have deepened Quasimodo or at the very least Phoebius. Thomas Mitchell does a fair job as Clopin, the King of the Miracles Court.
There's so many things worthy of the best production and blocksbusters that one wouldn't not consider the film as great entertainment but it tries so much to be an epic and a love story à la 'Beauty and the Beast' that it lacked one essential thing: a focus. I agree about a reviewer who commented that the crowds don't seem to act with consistency... the irony of the film is that while it denounces the regal stranglehold on the people, their fluctuating reactions toward 'Quasimodo' would make you wonder if it the cure wasn't worse than the evil...