A Film Canon

In keeping with Hugo's characterisation of Notre Dame as the protagonist of his iconic novel, this adaptation presents the hunchback Quasimodo (Charles Laughton) as a living gargoyle, his only voice the belfry, and only life the ambit of a single, infinitely expressive eye. As a mobile fragment of the cathedral, he meets its Lady in the form of persecuted gypsy Esmerelda (Maureen O'Hara), whose unconsummated marriage doesn't prevent her maternal love suffusing the entire creation, as she envisages her sanctuary as a giant, Edenic woodland, its pillars replaced by pines. For this reason, the central encounter between these two characters takes on the quality of a divine communion, or consummation, explaining the identification of Quasimodo with both God and Christ, his popular designation as the 'King Of Fools' lacking only a crown of thorns. This, in turn, reduces the terrestrial world to so much chaotic sinfulness and, more specifically, to a proliferation of deformed bodies that recall The Passion Of Joan Of Arc in their abjection, and Freaks in terms of Dieterle's unwillingness to offer them as straightforward voyeuristic objects. In doing so, he implicates the viewer in Quasimodo's predicament, dwelling on his spectacularly made-up face to force the inescapable conclusion that "the ugly is very appealing to man...we abstract pleasure from horror" - a paradox that sits well with the pervasive evocation of the medieval tendency to find pleasure in 'turning the world upside down', also evident in the Beggars' Court, where refraining from theft is punished by death.