Silents are Golden: A Closer Look At – The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)
The silent era is synonymous with many things: tenderly-lit romances, wacky silent comedies, edgy German Expressionism, and, of course, big-budget spectacles. From Intolerance (1916) to Metropolis (1927), silent era epics are uniquely fascinating when we consider that only a few decades prior, entertainment had been limited to the confines of a stage. It’s easy to imagine how exciting it must’ve been to be able to film actual massive crowds, and build real towering sets, to make grandiose visions come to life like never before.
One of the more well-known silent epics is The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), a Universal picture produced by Carl Laemmle and “boy wonder” Irving Thalberg. Taking six months to produce, using thousands of extras, and boasting a faithful recreation of the Notre Dame cathedral towers, it certainly gave audiences their money’s worth.
The choice to play the severely deformed bellringer Quasimodo was obviously, and practically predestined: Lon Chaney, who was already famous for his uncanny ability to play deformed or “freakish” characters. Chaney himself had longed to play Quasimodo well before the film was a twinkle in Laemmle and Thalberg’s eyes. He had even made plans to film a version of Hunchback for the Chelsea Pictures Company in Germany. These plans fell through in early 1922, and by September of that year Universal’s epic Hunchback feature was in production.
Chaney was still fresh from his famous turns as a con man in The Miracle Man (1919) and the legless crime lord in The Penalty (1920). Quasimodo would be one of his biggest challenges, being one of the most deformed characters to appear on the silent screen. Chaney used putty to shape the cheeks and details around the eyes, put in false teeth, donned a very knotted wig and finished it all off with a hump reportedly made of leather and plaster, weighing about 10-15 pounds. He apparently met with people who had actual deformities to learn about their experiences, poured over Victor Hugo’s descriptions of Quasimodo, and carefully worked on his posture and body language to look as authentic on screen as possible.
Esmerelda would be played by Patsy Ruth Miller (she had only been in films since 1921), Ernest Torrence was cast as Clopin the beggar king and leading man Norman Kerry was chosen to play Phoebus. Wallace Worsley, who had previously worked as a director with Chaney on four of his films (including The Penalty), was chosen to be the director. Rumor has it that Erich von Stroheim was the first choice for director, but he had been fired from Universal by this point.
The plot was changed quite a bit from Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel, partly to make it less grim and partly to keep from offending Christian sensibilities. The antagonist was changed from Archdeacon Claude Frollo to a new character called Jehan, the evil brother of a saintly archdeacon. Esmerelda isn’t hung at the end but is reunited with her love, Phoebus, while Quasimodo has a tragic end.
Production began with much fanfare, the studio boasting about its elaborate sets and “no expenses spared” mindset. Elmer F. Sheeley was in charge of set design, and Archie Hall was the technical director in charge of getting the sets solidly built. Sculptor Finn Froelich designed the statues, gargoyles, and other embellishments for the Notre Dame set. Old prints of Paris were poured over to create the sprawling, 19-acre complex of medieval streets, shops, and houses in Universal City, and of course the replica of the mighty Notre Dame itself took center stage. A feat of engineering and special effects, it was achieved by building the bottom sixty feet of the cathedral to scale, while the top half was actually a miniature hanging between the camera and the set in the background. The effect onscreen is seamless.
Authentic-looking paving stones were created with concrete sprayed with acid to make them look aged, and concrete arches were built over a portion of the Los Angeles River to turn it into the sewers of Paris. The painstaking work was much-admired by visitors to the sets, and trade papers touted them as one of the industry’s greatest achievements thus far.
One of the challenges of the productions was hiring thousands of extras (around 3,000 in all) for the crowd scenes, all of whom would have to be given costumes, daily pay, and meals. Many were recruited from the downtown Los Angeles area. A 125-foot wardrobe building was built to accommodate all the medieval garb, and supposedly some of the more visible extras were given their costumes a couple days early so they could get used to wearing them naturally. There was a definite desire to make the film seem authentic to its gritty period, rather than appearing “stagey” or overly romanticized.
All in all, Hunchback cost Universal a whopping $1,250,000 to produce. But fortunately the film was a megahit, ending up being the third highest-grossing film of 1923 just behind The Covered Wagon and The Ten Commandments. It generally received a good critical response as well, and while some reviews commented that the film was too dark, everyone praised Lon Chaney’s remarkable performance.
Today, most prints of Hunchback that circulate stem from 16mm copies, some choppier than others, any original 35mm negatives having vanished long ago. Fortunately better restorations have come out in recent years, allowing us to enjoy this ambitious classic–and Lon Chaney’s landmark performance–in the most clarity in decades.
Note: The American Cinematographer article “A Silent Giant: 1923’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame” was a very helpful source for this month’s column.
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–Lea Stans for Classic Movie Hub
You can read all of Lea’s Silents are Golden articles here.
Lea Stans is a born-and-raised Minnesotan with a degree in English and an obsessive interest in the silent film era (which she largely blames on Buster Keaton). In addition to blogging about her passion at her site Silent-ology, she is a columnist for the Silent Film Quarterly and has also written for The Keaton Chronicle.
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