Rating: 
Summary: A classic masterpiece
Review: A beautiful movie !!!! Sound, acting, music and story all come together to create a superb, intellegent, and unforgettable movie. The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a family classic.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent as drama @ history
Review: A classic that combines great acting and cinema with history. The common attitudes and conventions of medieval France drive the story. In the original book, the relationships and ending are less fulfilling, Hugo being a solid realist, but nobody could forget the final scenes confirming Laughton as one of our greatest screen actors. The interaction between the king @ his courtiers, not central to the plot, reflect the mores @ superstitions of the time, motivating Frolo, played by Hardwicke, as a villain formed by the circumstances of his time. If you saw this film as a child, as I did, you have been affected ever after.
Rating:
Summary: AFI's Great Love Stories: #98 The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Review: Certainly the 1939 film version of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" is more of a love story than the classic silent film starring Lon Chaney. Victor Hugo's novel is turned in a very complex love story, with Esmeralda (the fetching Maureen O'Hara in her first big role), the gypsy girl catching the eye of not only Quasimodo (Charles Laughton), but Frollo (Cedric Hardwicke), the Chief Justice. The fact that the girl is married is of little concern. I have always had problems with the Hunchback's make-up, specifically the fake eye on the disfigured face, but there is no doubting the strength of Laughton's performance. O'Hara pretty much has to stand around and look beautiful while those who are enthralled with her play out their deadly little games. Forget about the dense Freudian overtones and just focus on the metaphor of the young man who falls in love with someone he can never, ever have. Most romantic line(s): (1) "Sanctuary! Sanctuary!" (2) 'Why was I not made of stone--like thee?" Two Tear-Jerking Scenes: (1) When Esmeralda gives Quasimodo water upon the wheel and (2) when Quasimodo watches the lovers together. Okay, maybe these are more like heavy sniffling scenes. If you like "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," then check out these other films on AFI's list: #34 "Beauty and the Beast" and #24 "King Kong." Why? Because these are all variations on the Beauty and the Beast idea where the problem is that the man is too much the monster. Only rarely does this type of story have a happy ending.
Rating:
Summary: AFI's Great Love Stories: #98 The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Review: Certainly the 1939 film version of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" is more of a love story than the classic silent film starring Lon Chaney. Victor Hugo's novel is turned in a very complex love story, with Esmeralda (the fetching Maureen O'Hara in her first big role), the gypsy girl catching the eye of not only Quasimodo (Charles Laughton), but Frollo (Cedric Hardwicke), the Chief Justice. The fact that the girl is married is of little concern. I have always had problems with the Hunchback's make-up, specifically the fake eye on the disfigured face, but there is no doubting the strength of Laughton's performance. O'Hara pretty much has to stand around and look beautiful while those who are enthralled with her play out their deadly little games. Forget about the dense Freudian overtones and just focus on the metaphor of the young man who falls in love with someone he can never, ever have. Most romantic line(s): (1) "Sanctuary! Sanctuary!" (2) 'Why was I not made of stone--like thee?" Two Tear-Jerking Scenes: (1) When Esmeralda gives Quasimodo water upon the wheel and (2) when Quasimodo watches the lovers together. Okay, maybe these are more like heavy sniffling scenes. If you like "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," then check out these other films on AFI's list: #34 "Beauty and the Beast" and #24 "King Kong." Why? Because these are all variations on the Beauty and the Beast idea where the problem is that the man is too much the monster. Only rarely does this type of story have a happy ending.
Rating:
Summary: Movie acting doesn't get any better than this!
Review: Charles Laughton delivers what is,unequivocally, one of Hollywood's greatest performances. His "Quasimodo" embodies all of an actor's craft. Hidden and hard unrecognizable under heavy makeup, the performer manages to convey the spectrum of human emotion. A young Maureen O'Hara as the beautiful "Esmeralda" and Sir Cedric Hardwicke as the sinister "Frollo" are equally as mesmerizing. Acting 101 should make this required viewing and no film library is complete without it.
Rating:
Summary: Movie acting doesn't get any better than this!
Review: Charles Laughton delivers what is,unequivocally, one of Hollywood's greatest performances. His "Quasimodo" embodies all of an actor's craft. Hidden and hard unrecognizable under heavy makeup, the performer manages to convey the spectrum of human emotion. A young Maureen O'Hara as the beautiful "Esmeralda" and Sir Cedric Hardwicke as the sinister "Frollo" are equally as mesmerizing. Acting 101 should make this required viewing and no film library is complete without it.
Rating: 
Summary: Laughton is Amazing
Review: Charles Laughton is one of the great actors of all time. Watching this version of Vitor Hugo's novel it is not hard to see why. Laughton looks like he was born to play Quasimodo, the deaf and disfigured bell keeper of Notre Dome Cathedral. Wearing heavy face make up and a body suit, Laughton literally transformed himself to play the part. This novel has been adapted several times for the screen , but this is the best one. The performances are on the whole excellent. Particularly Cedric Hardwicke as the cold Chief Justice of Paris. Maureen O'Hara also gives a strong performance as Esmeralda. The direction of William Dieterle is very good, although he concentates a little too much on the subplots at times. On the whole this is an excellent film, that despite it's age, hardly seems dated. The story is a timeless classic and so is this film. Watch it just for Laughton's performance.
Rating:
Summary: Good movie
Review: Charles Laughton's performance of Quasimodo is excellent, instilling not only sympathy for the character, but also a sense of how the character's deformity caused him to be abused by not only the common people, but by a clergyman also. It's not really fair to compare this version with the Lon Chaney silent. Chaney's performance is the stuff of legend, but this version is excellent. The visual quality is much better. The Chaney version is a classic, but it was a one-man show practically. Laughton's version has many fine performances by other actors also. Recommended
Rating:
Summary: Timeless, In Every Dimension
Review: Even granting my utter lack of objectivity in evaluating this Hunchback after knowing it for 45 years (during which I must have seen it close to 50 times, including two viewings in the past two weeks), it remains brilliant in every respect. Laughton's performance remains unmatched and the gold standard for Quasimodo interpreters. The 19-year-old Maureen O'Hara is as fresh and lovely and humane as in my earliest recollections. Sir Cedric Hardwick (an apt handle for the Jean Frollo character, no?) is a perfect, pinched-nostril'd villain. RKO's production values are second to none, and Joseph August's photography (coupled to Dieterle's film sensibility and scene framing, so touched by German cinematic impressionism) is absolute perfection. So too is the heralded Alfred Newman score, perhaps the finest marriage of musical phrase to filmed sequence to that point in film history--swellingly Wagnerian at emotional highpoints, but lean, linear, and distinctly 15th-16th century when period atmosphere is called for (listen for Tielmann Susato and other renaissance masters, skillfully woven in). But, in the end, it's Laughton and Paris and the brilliantly recreated cathedral that stand at the picture's center. Unspeakably beautiful and, in the end, unbearably heartbreaking. The DVD transfer, however, is something of a disappointment--only three stars for its quality, particularly in the first reel. But don't get me wrong--it's more than simply "watchable" and looks as good as anything else from the period you you might run across on TCM; it improves from the picture's middle third on, and the sound is fine. The DVD extras are extremely valuable for recounting many production details; indeed, what I had always thought to be spectacularly wrought matte shots were, I learned in the included production documentary, a 5-acre recreation of 15th century Paris, designed from old woodcuts and drawings. (The otherwise fine documentary sadly omits all mention of cinematographer August, who shot a number of pictures--Gunga Din, They Were Expendable, The Informer, The Devil and Daniel Webster--that are as often remembered for their distinctive "look" and as for their "film classic" status.) And the Maureen O'Hara interview, for those of us who grew up smitten with her, is a sheer delight--more than a half-century later and as flashing and beautiful as ever. Film buffs make a big to-do over 1939 as "Hollywood's Greatest Year." Everyone else will agree once they get a load of the filmography of 1939 that's included here as an extra. It's just a list, but what a list. Permesso...a biographical aside: Dieterle's Hunchback, which holds a special place in my heart for a variety of reasons, but especially because it led directly to twin additions: to books, and to movies. As a little boy, my love for this story story naturally led me to read my first adult "chapter book"--a 35 cent Bantam translation of the Hugo novel. I've been book-addicted ever since, transposing my library browsing to the adult stacks and leapfrogging the entire body of classic juvenile literature that I eventually wound up reading to my own children. And movie-addicted, too--also as a boy, I hunted down the Lon Chaney Hunchback in a NYC repertory film house, saw the (inferior) Tony Quinn version in the theater, and since have seen, I suppose, every subsequent remake. And I also saw almost all of those wonderful 1939 pictures, mostly on Million Dollar Movie, the old NY WOR program that showed a movie about 16 times a week (twice a week day and three times a day on weekends). Generally, a movie held as dearly in memory as I have held this simply cannot doesn't sustain its recalled impact on re-viewing--it may seem dated, or trite, or visually uncompelling, emotionally vapid, saccharine, etc., to a contemporary film lover. But the Dieterle/Laughton Hunchback remains an indispensable film, here presented in an outstanding package, and at a bargain price.
Rating:
Summary: An underrated American classic
Review: For me the Laughton version is one of the most underrated American films of all time. It is all too often lumped in with the horror genre. The movie successfully brings forth much of Hugo's commentary on the era. Couple this with the wonderful choral music, superb matting involving Notre Dame cathedral, literate script and excellent performances and one is presented with a gem of great early renaissance flavor. Edmond O'Brien's Gringoire is at once foolish and heroic. Cedric Hardwicke's Frollo is wonderfully conceived as a victim of his times and not as a villian for villiany's sake. Of the American films I have seen to date, this movie has always been on my top-ten list of great American movies.
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