I have asked certain users on Spout to recommend a movie to me. I will be blogging about these films as I watch them. This film was recommended to me by Dr_Gor
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
I think I may have possibly interacted with my good friend Dr_Gor more than anyone else on Spout over the years. I think he is my closest rival for the number of postings made in group discussions. The HORROR MOVIES 101 group which Gor began and has shepherded along through the years has been the most popular and active group on Spout. I don't believe there to be anyone on Spout with a greater knowledge of horror movies than Gor, and yet his definition of horror as a genre is much broader than many people try to confine it to. At times he can be a bit crude, but admits this himself with his often used self description of "caveman", but most of the time he is amongst the most articulate members of the site. He has been the instigator in many of the most memorable discussion on the site, and for that I completely love him. Although we've had some arguments, that is what the site is for after all, and I usually learn a lot and have a lot of fun by the time they are over.
Gor's recommendation to me came at no surprise whatsoever, but that is only because he has recommended it to me so many times in the past and I have apparently been too lazy to finally get around to seeing it. Not that I didn't have any interest in it. On the contrary, sometimes the movies I want to see the most are the ones I put off for seeing the longest. Maybe it's because I like that looming over me. I like have a movie waiting for me that I know I will like when I really want to see it. Or maybe I'm afraid that I won't like it as much as I think I will. In this case, I knew the film's reputation as being one of the greatest literary adaptations of this book or any other book at that time. And I knew the director William Dieterle as the director of one of my absolute favorite films The Devil and Daniel Webster (which is also an adaptation but of a short story that needed to be expanded instead of a massive novel that needed to be compacted). The only thing that put me off was that I had already seen the Lon Chaney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and was not overly impressed. I felt like if this was the same story I might be bored, but that was my only major fear.
I guess the biggest standout element of the film for me was Charles Laughton and his performance as the hunchback Quasimodo. I think it's interesting that the hunchback character is not necessarily the main character of the story, yet since his name is the title and the character takes such a special actor to handle, this is usually the actor with the most credit in the film. The makeup job here is excellent as is Laughton's acting through all of it. No complaints about the rest of the actors either though. It was exciting to see some other great actors like Thomas Mitchell and Edmund O'Brien here too. I hardly recognized O'Brien though. I saw his name in the credits and it took me half the movie before I realized which part he was playing. He is so young here! This was his first movie. And such a great actor you can see it here right from the beginning.
The adaptation was different enough too from the earlier Lon Chaney film too that it kept me interested. Some characters seemed to be added, and some removed. And people seemed to have different motivations. Still, I am not really motivated to ever read the book. Maybe there's so much more there that I'm not aware of. Maybe the prose is something special that I wouldn't know about until I actually got into it. I know that Lord of the Rings was my favorite book for a long time, and the same Dr_Gor who recommended this movie to me lists the recent film adaptations of that book as some of his favorite movies as well. Now THAT is a gigantic book. And even with such long movies I know it was a struggle to try to fit the massive expanse of the text onto the screen. But I still find the hunchback story a bit bland when you pull back from it. Although after seeing these two film version I am kind of shocked to know that there was an animated Disney version of this film as well! It seems too gruesome for that. But now that I think about it, a lot of Disney animated films were culled from some pretty gruesome fairy tales and other source material.
The story is not bad. For me it is good, but not the greatest. Yet the acting is fantastic, and the filmmaking is expert. It takes the story and makes it captivating. The uses of shadow in different situations gives a great sense of atmosphere. And the action scenes are epic. *SPOILER* Beginning with the scene of Quasimodo swinging down at a great distance on a rope to save Esmeralda until the end of the film is a great long sequence of action *END SPOILER*
Sorry Gor if I didn't like it quite as much as you had hoped, but I still found it to be quite fun and well worth watching.
William Dieterle:
Total feature length films seen: 2
Previous average film score: 10
New average film score: 9
Rating: 8/10