The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) - film review

Across Europe, in the aftermath of the One Hundred Years War, a new age of peace and civilisation beckons.  Yet some of the old prejudices and superstitions remain.  When a party of gypsies arrive in Paris to join in the annual Fools’ Festival, they are persecuted.  One of their number is the beautiful dancer Esmeralda, under whose spell Frollo, the austere priest of Notre Dame Cathedral, falls.  Unable to control his desire for Esmeralda, Frollo kills her lover and allows her to take the blame for the murder.  Just as Esmeralda is about to be put to death, she is rescued by the cathedral’s hunchbacked bell ringer, Quasimodo.  In the sanctuary of the cathedral, the gypsy girl is safe – but not for long...

RKO Picture’s ambitious The Hunchback of Notre Dame is regarded by many as the best film adaptation of Victor Hugo’s celebrated novel.  With a budget of two million dollars, it was one of the most expensive films of its time, and with its slick production values, immense crowd scenes and lavish design, it shows.  It compares favourably with the famous silent 1923 version (which starred Lon Chaney) and amply surpasses the 1956 film Notre Dame de Paris by French director Jean Delannoy.

The film’s main strength is its impressive art direction by Van Nest Polglase, who would famously work on Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941).  The film was directed by William Dieterle, a German émigré who made several high quality films during his productive time in Hollywood.  The only real let down is the screenplay which is at best mediocre, at worst painfully trite, with some awkward sentimentality and some even clumsier attempts at grafting on a few dollops of historical retrospection.  It’s a shame the film was encumbered with its obligatory Hollywood happy ending (very different to what we find in Hugo’s novel), which now feels tacky and somewhat meaningless.

In its design and the way it is shot (with frequent nods to German expressionism), the film resembles a Universal Pictures Gothic horror movie, with the hunchback portrayed less as a real human being and more as a Frankenstein-style monster.  Similarities with RKO’s previous King Kong (1933) are readily apparent.   Fortunately, a heavily made-up Charles Laughton manages to portray Quasimodo convincingly and with great pathos and so the film manages to avoid ending up as the shallow horror pastiche it could have been.

© James Travers 2008

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