The Hunchback of Notre Dame is another sad story about a disfigured man falling in love with a beautiful lady. Although a work of fiction, the film is a borderline horror film much like the Joseph Merrick's story (see: The Elephant Man 1980 - which is based on true life of Merrick) yet the two stories are completely different.Lon Chaney, Sr. played the part of Quasimodo so believably well. Just simply brilliant. The rest of the cast in this silent film classic is also great - wonderful performances.If you liked this movie then try to find copies of 'London after Midnight' and 'The Phantom of the Opera' - both starring Lon Chaney, Sr.9/10

I purposely gave this film a somewhat lower rating than one might expect or think that it deserves.This was done solely because I don't enjoy a film that focuses in on the likes of grubby, low-life peasants, be they from the 15th Century or from the present.My aversion to bottom-of-the-barrel peasants is directly associated with the fact that I live within "a-hop-skip-and-a-jump" away from Canada's skid-row capital, which is located at the intersection of Main & Hastings streets in Vancouver, BC.I think that if you lived down in these dregs, as well, you'd be pretty damn repulsed and fed-up with the realities of what peasant life is really all about. You certainly wouldn't appreciate seeing it being somewhat glorified in a 100-year-old movie like this one.Anyways - This film's story is pretty depressing with Quasimodo (the hunchback) contemptuously spitting on the peasants and the peasants, in return, spitting back at him. And pretty, little Esmeralda, the sweetest gypsy girl (with a heart of gold), being forced into the middle of things and being spit on from both sides, while all the hot-blooded guys (including hideous Quasimodo) wantonly eyeing her.Yeah. There's plenty of treachery & betrayal & revenge & whatnot thrown into the mix (for good measure). But its too much of a focus on the truly ugly side of human nature. So, this film, in turn, fails to serve as viable entertainment after a while.The Hunchback Of Notre Dame's story is just too mean-spirited to sustain one's interest for very long and, with that, I cannot give this film more than a 4-star rating.

. . . as the main villain of Victor Hugo's original novel, Capt. Phoebus, GETS THE GIRL HERE, and poor Quasimodo dies of knife wounds and falling 150 feet, NOT romantically of a broken heart in the arms of his beloved, Esmeralda, as is the case in the REAL, better plot line. But as Hollywood illustrated more recently in the Demi Moore remake of THE SCARLET LETTER, they've never been unwilling to hire "writers" with second-grade educations to "improve" master works by literary giants such as Hugo, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain, Washington Irving, William Shakespeare, Margaret Mitchell, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens, and whoever else is in that famous deck of cards. Poll the American public on how many kids Scarlett O'Hara had in real life, and 99% of the answers would be "one"--since that's the number shown on-screen during the four hours of GONE WITH THE WIND, and the percentage of movie watchers too lazy to read an 1,100-page book and willing to trust Hollywood would NOT leave out anything important in a flick titled after a seminal book, such as Scarlett's OTHER kids! Now I'm not saying that I would be anymore up for a goat hanging than the next person, but it's certainly more than irritating to have director Wallace Worsley and the writing team of Perley Sheehan-Edward Lowe, Jr. turn Hugo's pathos into Disney cartoon-like bathos.

Once you have seen Lon Chaney in his incredible make-up, and witness his acrobatic tumbles along the walls of the Gargoyled Cathedral, you will never forget it. A testament to a visual Artist and an enduring presence on screen.He becomes a dual persona of Monster and Man in the same shot. Although heavily masked with horrific features that are truly scary, there is undoubtedly a Heart and Soul beneath the Wordly exterior.The Film is superbly mounted and populated with peasants and pageantry that make this more than Chaney and the Hunchback but it is far less when he is absent. A must see in its newly discovered transfer from a 35MM Print with Tint and Score. Try and erase the memory of all of those cut, and awful Public Domain Videos that have been around for ever and rediscover this one before making final judgments and comparisons to the many other Filmed versions.