Programme notes CH 03 — The Haunted Screen
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
A deaf bell-ringer in medieval Paris gives everything for the dancer who once brought him water.
Universal built the west front of Notre-Dame on its backlot, and Lon Chaney climbed it. His Quasimodo is bent under a rubber hump and a harness, one eye sealed with wax. The make-up sold the picture, but the performance is in the hands, always reaching for something and pulling back. Patsy Ruth Miller plays Esmeralda as a girl, not a temptress. Watch the pillory: he is flogged before the crowd and begs for water, and she is the one who climbs up with it. When the mob storms the cathedral he answers from the towers with molten lead.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Wallace Worsley
- Photographed by
- Virgil Miller
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Lon Chaney at Universal, two years apart and both times in Paris: a disfigured man who loves a woman from a height, an opera house roof or a bell tower, and a mob coming for him at the end.