The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Rating:
Summary: The Hunchback of Dilettantism
Review: This is a terrible, terrible adaptation of Victor Hugos novel. The novel is one of the great landmarks of Humanist Litterature, while this is simply an uptight morality-play of the somewhat Victorian orientation. Claude Frollo, one of the great villains of litterature, is in this version meek as a lamb (he's a catholic priest for God's sake), while his villainy is rendered to his secular brother, Jehan, thus creating a dualism (good/evil) that is totally foreign to the humanism of the novel. Jehans villainy is consisting of his base lust after Esmaralda, the sexy gipsy girl (bad people are horny, good people are in love). But alas, her sexuality is hampered too, even her familiar, the goat, is missing! Phoebus, who in the novel seduced Esmaralda simply because he was able to, taking advantage of her girlish admiration for his manners and shiny armour, is turned into a coy and rather laughable vaudeville-jeune premier, his intentions are quite honorable and poor Esmaralda want's to go to a nunnery to save his honour. Even worse, Clopin, the leader of the rebellious crowd fighting the decadent aristocracy, is portraied as a sneering creep, thus forcing us to question his heroic ambitions on a somewhat unjust grounding. And Quasimodo? Well, Lon Chaney does his usual routine, twitching under a mass of make-up. This is really just one of his "thousand faces".
Nothing works, apart from the spectacular setpieces of medieval Paris. And old age can't be blamed (in the same period the germans were creating expressionist masterpieces still working) but simply bad storytelling. Watch the 1939-version instead, starring Charles Laughton and Maureen O'Hara, that's a true classic. Or better still: read the novel.