THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 39, 21 March 1940, Page 20

THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME

(RKO) This, like "Beau Geste," is a re-make of a famous silent picture. It is also a screen version of a famous novel. But if the new " Hunchback" has lost most of the atmosphere of Victor Hugo, it has replaced this with something which, from the film point of view, is probably just abseut as important-a sense of vivid action and huge spectacle. As a general rule, the further Hollywood gets away from the present the harder it finds the task of bringing the past to life: and in this case the mobs of Paris seldom resemble anything but ‘a collection of Hollywood extras in colourful fancy dress, and the Paris of the fifteenth century seldom seems much more than just a collection of stones, plaster and back-cloths assembled with typical Hollywood lavishness. Yet within those limits they are very efficient Hollywood crowds, and the cathedral of Notre Dame is a very large and handsome Hollywood edifice. Adding notably to the interest of the show is the fact that Charles Laughton, as Quasimodo the Hunchback, achieves a repulsiveness outrivalling even that of Lon Chaney in the silent version. By some magic of make-up, Mr. Laughton gives the impression of carrying his bulging paunch on his shoulders. One Laughton eye blinks ferociously under a beetling brow, while the other has slipped down his cheek and stares unwinkingly. Thus cumbersomely equipped, Mr. Laughton is surprisingly agile when it comes to swinging on bells and ropes high up in Hollywood’s Notre Dame.

Considering his habit of doing most of the talking in any film he graces. I must confess I am rather surprised that Charles Laughton should have accepted this role, for he hardly opens his mouth at all. However, he manages quite properly to excite some sympathy as well as repulsion. Hollywood has gone its own sweet way with the details of the Hugo story, while maintaining the broad outlines, After providing audiences with such gruesome highlights as a flogging, a hanging, and a visit to the torture chambers, the producers apparently could not screw up their courage to kill off quite as many of the leading characters as Hugo did. For instance, the gipsy heroine, La Esmeralda, comes through it alive and with a husband. Following the big scene in which Quasimodo drops boiling lead and stone blocks on the mob storming the cathedral, she departs in safety with that quaint fellow, Pierre Gringoire, while her hunchbacked rescuer looks despondently on. If I remember history aright, the real Louis XI. wasn’t nearly such a benevolent old eccentric as RKO would have us believe (his benevolence and eccentricity in the film consist chiefly of an anxiety that his subjects should have the right of free speech). And if I remember my Hugo aright, the villain of the piece was a tonsured priest. Hollywood, with more tact, has turned him into a wicked, lustful Minister of Justice (a role which Sir Cedric Hardwicke handles with sepulchral malevolence), and has given him a brother who is a good archbishop (Walter Hampden, America’s leading Shakespearean actor), It would appear to be’ Maureen O’Hara’s screen destiny to be leered over by Laughton. Having escaped his attentions in " Jamaica Inn," she now falls once again into his ugly clutches, But he, like the audience* and the Minister of Justice, is soon bewitched by her dark beauty, and the clutches are gentle.