NR | 1h 56min | Drama | 1939
The year 2024 marks the 85th anniversary of director William Dieterle’s film “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” based on Victor Hugo’s novel and set in 15th-century Paris. It’s also the year the now-restored Gothic cathedral of Notre Dame reopens after a ruinous fire in 2019.
Prudent King Louis XI (Harry Davenport) presides over the hearts and minds of a people wracked by superstition and prejudice; his God-fearing archdeacon (Walter Hampden) presides over their souls. The archdeacon’s haughty brother, Chief Justice Jehan Frollo (Cedric Hardwicke), wants to rid Notre Dame of heathens, witches, sorcerers, and gypsies.
Frustrating for Frollo as she is below his social class, gorgeous gypsy Esmeralda (Maureen O’Hara) catches his eye, and she does that for other men too: the poet Gringoire (Edmund O'Brien), the soldier Phoebus (Alan Marshal), and the hideous outcast, deaf hunchback and cathedral bell-ringer Quasimodo (Charles Laughton).
As the supposed epitome of aristocratic elegance, if not beauty, Frollo seems the best suitor for the lovely Esmeralda. But he’s ugly because he’s bereft of truth and goodness. When townsfolk jokingly crown Quasimodo “king of fools,” Frollo can’t stand his getting even mocking attention, as Quasimodo is Frollo’s ward.
Consumed by jealousy that Esmeralda prefers Phoebus, Frollo kills him and then bears the weight of his judicial might down on Esmeralda, Gringoire, and Quasimodo. Cornered, Esmeralda’s beauty, Gringoire’s truth, and Quasimodo’s goodness gather in the shadow of the brooding cathedral in one last stand against all that’s ugly, false, and evil in Notre Dame.
Dieterle and the screenwriters take liberties, reshaping some of Hugo’s characters. Made some four decades before David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man,” also about a deformed protagonist, and despite lacking special effects commonplace by the late 20th century, Dieterle’s film radiates power and profundity. He lends his characters an aura of courage and conviction that earlier stage and silent film productions do not have.
Laughton yells his pathos while Hardwicke whispers his villainy, his desperation, and even his rage. O’Hara, at 19 years old and 5 feet 8 inches tall, does the rest, with her flawless skin, flaming red hair, expansive green eyes, bewitching smile, and delicate voice. Subsequent color films do her astonishing beauty greater justice, but she’s no less arresting in this lovingly crafted black-and-white production.
A Sanctuary Cathedral
Publicly lashed for trying to smuggle Esmeralda into the cathedral (on Frollo’s orders), Quasimodo undergoes a Christ-like sacrificial beating. When he cries out his thirst, the mob throws him a wet rag. With biblical overtones, Gringoire muses on the irony: “Yesterday, on the same spot, they crowned him their king!”Characters hail the cathedral as “Sanctuary.” But sanctuary to the innocent is sometimes suffocation to those less innocent. Esmeralda’s love aspires to be as pure as Quasimodo’s, and she briefly senses that chasm. He exults in the cry of the bells, embracing their mammoth metal shoulders, swinging on their huge hips. She falls to the ground; that same sound is too deafening for her.
A sermon of its own, Quasimodo’s ringing is like a prophet’s call to holiness: The closer the faithful come to the light of God and his cathedral, the more they realize the darkness within them. Likewise, Quasimodo doesn’t realize how ugly he is until he sees up close that Esmeralda is so beautiful.
Selflessness may not always create a relationship, but only selflessness can sustain one. Infatuated, Frollo warns Esmeralda: “I want you for myself alone. If I can’t have that, it will be my end—and yours.” Without any sense of self-awareness, he asks the archdeacon to exonerate him of his guilt of murder; after all, he says, “You are my brother.” But the archdeacon disavows him for his selfish lack of repentance. “I am no longer your brother.”
King Louis describes cathedrals in the film as being “mighty guardians keeping alive the faith. Every arch, every column, every statute is a carved leaf out of history, a book in stone, the handwriting of the past.”
Naturally, Dieterle pays touching tribute to such traditional art with his long shots of fingers of light gracing the cathedral aisle through stained-glass windows, and low-angle shots of stone pillars stretching up to the sky, as if in prayerful thanks.
