Word: hunchback
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Blue Danube. A nobleman refuses to marry a rich brewer's daughter, while he woos a poor innkeeper's daughter (Leatrice Joy), while an unloved hunchback (Joseph Schildkraut) stabs himself, while the captions say over & over: "Always remember that as long as the Danube flows, I shall love you." Nicely filmed and dull...
...picturesque despair. Now, under a title which is highly absurd and which has reference to nothing except the box-offices of small-town theatres, with a background of South American rather than Italian roads and castles, is told the medieval legend of Paolo and Francesca. A huge, hunchbacked, hirsute grandee marries a small and beautiful lady who loves his handsome brother. When the hunchback goes away to war, love for each other overcomes pity and discretion in the wife and brother. Told, by a villainous clown, of their misconduct, the hunchback gallops home to make sure the story...
This brief plot is motivated, behind its glitter of extravagant romance, by true and human emotions. Lionel Barrymore, onetime stage actor, is able to indicate the burly pathos of the hunchback who loves his brother as much as he does his wife but can forgive neither of them for their sin. Mary Philbin, garbed in tight and tenuous garments, is almost equally competent to express her perplexity in the choice between loyalty and passion. The younger brother to the hunchback is a handsome cinemactor of Valentinoesque appearance; his name is Don Alvarado...
...said, however, before turning to particulars, that "Les Miserables" qualifies with "Don Juan" and "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" to a place in that small and select group of movies which have successfully recounted one of the classic themes of literature. In the first place, "Les Miserables" was produced in France with an entirely French cast so that we are spared the painful experience of seeing Hollywood blondes in the role of early nineteenth century Parisian beauties and handsome Anglo-Saxon heroes in the part of Latin apaches. In the second place, there is scarcely a flaw in the artistic...
Author Gorky introduces characteristic figures-the hunchback brother who tries to hang himself for hopeless love, later becoming a monk, then losing his faith; women of various shapes and sizes, uniformly brainless except Pyotr's mother-in-law, who became his father's mistress; a pink-faced carpenter, a philosophizing ancient and that creature as indispensable to a Russian novel as are bobbed hair and bachelors to the Saturday Evening Post-the village idiot. But Author Gorky's powers, however fully displayed here, have produced books that were far more readable than this one. The action...