with Dmetri Kakmi

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

USA 1939

Director: William Dieterle

Cast: Charles Laughton, Maureen O’Hara, Cedrick Hardwike, Edmund O’Brien

It is axiomatic of life and fiction that beauty, male or female, constitutes the norm. Yet beauty is rarely the generator of plot; Homer’s Helen of Troy is the only one that comes to mind. Paradoxically, it is ugliness that is most suited to generating character and hence narrative. Look at The Man Who Laughs (1928), Freaks (1932), The Elephant Man (1980) and Mask (1985). 

It is also true that Lon Chaney invented cinematic ugliness. In 1923 he too played Quasimodo, the hunchback, just as he would go on to portray other horrors on screen. But his is not the greatest portrayal of Victor Hugo’s (anti)hero. 

The honour belongs to the great Charles Laughton whose rendition of Quasimodo is perfection, as sensitive and nuanced a portrayal of an outsider as you can hope to get. He rends the heart in a performance that owes much to silent cinema because it relies on conveying emotion, not through dialogue, but through body language and the face.

‘We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces,’ says Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950). Charles Laughton had a face too. It was not pretty. Or handsome. One might even say he had a face that was perfect for radio. His was a face and a body no man with ‘a strong streak of homosexuality,’ as Laughton himself put it to Robert Mitchum, would want to be born with, and it caused him great anguish. 

In the guise of Quasimodo, Laughton, who was married to Elsa Lanchester, The Bride of Frankenstein herself, takes the distress and misery he is said by his wife to have felt and channels it into one of the great screen performances. It shines through the brightly assessing eyes when he first appears on screen. Though he cuts a grotesque figure, it is evident from the way he scans the crowd that he is no monster. His is a noble spirit trapped in a twisted body. That doesn’t stop the Parisian rabble from staring in abject fascination before expelling him from their midst.

On the instant we are reminded of an observation made earlier by Harry Davenport as King Louis XI. ‘One shrinks from the ugly and one wants to look at it. There’s a devilish fascination in it. We extract pleasure from horror.’ 

He might be summoning up the history of horror movies. 

This being a parable of fifteenth-century Paris, ugliness is sharply contrasted with beauty, ignorance with knowledge, darkness with light, and degradation with intellectual and spiritual elevation. Quasimodo walks a fraught line between these states, veering wildly from one to the other and back again. His is the eternal human condition. Though he is ruthless when needed (he bathes the great unwashed in hot oil when they try to break into the cathedral), he is also smarter and in possession of more insight and intelligence than those around him. As a fiction that made his way into global consciousness he is Victor Hugo’s bridge between the darkness of the Middle Ages and the light of the Renaissance — ignorance vying with enlightenment.

As a would-be lover Quasimodo is too good for Maureen O’Hara’s Esmeralda. (Elsa Lanchester said of O’Hara, ‘Butter wouldn’t melt in Maureen’s mouth, or anywhere else for that matter.’) All agree that Esmeralda is pretty. Yeah, pretty stupid. She and Gringoire deserve each other. In the end, as they traipse off to populate the earth with their dimwitted offspring, Quasimodo looks upon them from his eyrie in the cathedral and asks the gargoyles, ‘Why was I not made of stone, like thee?’ 

Easy. The gargoyles are in the movie for analogous pictorial composition. Added four centuries later, they weren’t there in the fifteenth-century, when Quasimodo gambolled in the belfry. Thus William Dieterle’s romantic testament collapses time, merging centuries as Europe heads toward World War II, further proof that history is neither linear, nor a salutary lesson for humanity.

Quasimodo, on the other hand, is eternal. Like the old gods, he is resurrected every few decades to cast a jaundiced eye on the world that made him thus.

Dmetri Kakmi is the author of The Dictionary of a Gadfly (as The Sozzled Scribbler), The Door and Other Uncanny Tales, Mother Land, and When We Were Young (as editor). His novel The Woman in the Well will be published in 2025. He is currently working on a crime novel called The Perfect Room.