[.ca] The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)

From Amazon.co.uk:
Lon Chaney, the man of a thousand faces, was best known for playing Quasimodo and the Phantom of the Opera. But the former role in The Hunchback of Notre Dame was clearly the most ambitious of his illustrious career, full of such longing and anguish. It's as though his entire being was consumed by this ugly outcast with a heart as big and beautiful as Notre Dame itself. And the makeup is still astonishing. The rest of this unrequited love story is pretty effective as well, with the re-creation of medieval Paris a standout for its lavishness. Like all great silent films, it delivers a poetry of life that is abstract and tangible at the same time. --Bill Desowitz

Additional Features:
This is not the classic Disney animated version.

what exactly does "remastered" mean?:
I bought this dvd instead of other cheaper ones available of this classic movie, thinking I would get a better quality. Perhaps I've been spoiled by other really good DVD of silent film masterpieces, and I don't know what the cheaper DVD are actually like, but if this was remastered, the picture quality does not show it. I give the DVD 3 stars.

Someone Please Save This Great Film:
It is a measure of the greatness of this film that it is still so deeply moving in spite of the atrocious quality of this recording. Surely it is worth the cost of making a good print. As it is, it's a disgrace. The superior quality of this film is mostly the result of the team of Lon Chaney Sr.(Quasimodo) and the director, Wallace Worsley. There is nothing significantly dated about this film. Its power as truly cinematic (image-based) art is still far beyond most films and nothing in the budget-obsessed Hollywood of today can touch it. Lon Chaney's incredible performance, without the aid of sound(voice)and so well captured by Worsley, is the molten core that radiates its heat and energy to everything else in the film. For me Chaney's Quasimodo is a deeper, more compelling and more truly cinematic creation than that of Charles Laughton. Chaney's Quasimodo is not just pathetic, he is truly frightening, vastly more so than Laughton's, and yet he is utterly heartbreaking. This is one of the few examples of genius captured on celluloid and it should be protected for coming generations. America needs to learn to take care of its precious little real art. This film gets 5 stars, but this recording deserves no more than 2. Nonetheless, I must still highly recommend it. I hope there is someone who cares who has the means to save this great film

A SILENT MASTERPIECE.:
In spite of being dubbed the "Man of a Thousand Faces", what sticks in the viewer's memory isn't Chaney's fairly conventional make-up, but rather the way he used his body - his movements and contortions. Bowed under the 72-pound weight of a rubber hump that made it difficult for him to stand up straight, Chaney adopts a weird ape-like crouch, as though his legs were too rickety to support him, but which allows him to scuttle about in a manner frighteningly part-simian and part-arachnoid. Surprisingly eneptly mounted - considering its lavish budget - i.e. many social, religious and sexual abberations which were central to the Hugo novel are missing - and wretchedly directed by Wallace Worsley with a constant flurry of extras milling about, this famous silent film survives solely through Chaney's remarkable performance. Too many horror fans are disappointed, it seems, when they find out that this Victor Hugo story is essentially a historical romance. However, viewers will nevertheless be impressed by Lon Chaney's excellent portrayal of the tragic Quasimodo. For this 1923 extravaganza, it took Universal a year to prepare the enormous sets, a four-month shooting schedule and an incredible cast of 3500 supporting players and extras. Interestingly enough, there were a number of earlier silent versions - the most notable being THE DARLING OF PARIS (1916) - in which Quasimodo won Esmeralda!