Regardless of the political implications of deeming
Quasimodo—a disfigured human (though hardly a disabled one—the guy has more
gymnastic skills than Mary Lou Retton)—a monster, there’s no question that
Wallace Worsley’s The Hunchback of Notre
Dame launched the Universal Monster age. And while the title characters’
monstrousness may be in question, the film’s horror element is not. None of its
genre peers are as horrifically violent; none display such acts of cruelty—from
the torture Quasimodo and his unattainable love Esmeralda suffer to his crazed
molten lead retaliation against their would-be captors. Yet this is also a film
of stark compassion and mercy, best conveyed by the divine Lon Chaney’s
expression when Esmeralda gives him a drink after his whipping.
Mastered from a multi-tint 16mm print struck from the
original negative, Flicker Alley’s new blu-ray edition of The Hunchback of Notre Dame gives us what will likely be the
clearest details of Chaney’s nuanced performance we’ll see. Not that it will
fool you into thinking it was filmed last week. Scratches and artifacts are pervasive. I don’t doubt that this 16mm
print is beyond complete restoration, but I wonder if more could have been done
about some of those blemishes. Nevertheless, compared to the utterly
unwatchable reprints proliferating public domain collections, this improvement
is striking. I’m not sure how marked the improvement is over Image
Entertainment’s “Ultimate Edition” DVD from 2007 (which runs 117 minutes versus
this blu-ray’s 110—additional speed correction could account for the time
difference), but I do know that most of that edition’s extras reappear on
Flicker Alley’s, including Robert Israel’s elegant realization of Donald
Hunsberger’s compiled score, Chaney biographer Michael F. Blake’s audio
commentary, stills galleries (sans the DVD’s 3-D content), and a short film of
Chaney on set in his street clothes. The major new edition is the surviving
thirteen minutes of Joseph De Grasse’s charming 1915 fairy tale Alas and Alack, in which Chaney briefly
appears as a hunchback.
