Word: hunchback
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Next in line for possible rehabilitation: Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame and Dumas' The Three Musketeers...
...sorely afflicted and afflicted with sores, he stays hunched over on his knees for half an hour. And here he touches greatness; to find a just comparison, one must go all the way back to Lon Chaney Sr.'s title-role performance in the 1922 film version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame...
...Hunchback of Notre Dame (Paris; Allied Artists) offers a Quasimodo (Anthony Quinn) who is as ugly as an iguana, but as lovable as a kitten and no more frightening. In two earlier filmings of Victor Hugo's romance, Lon Chaney (1923) and Charles Laughton (1939) took care to spook the audience out of its wits before building up sympathy for the. lovesick, crookbacked bell ringer. But the current Technicolor version (with a French supporting cast, dubbed-in English) introduces Notre Dame's resident troll tenderly stroking a pigeon on one of the cathedral's balustrades...
...Hunchback of Notre Dame, the organ-playing ghoul of The Phantom of the Opera, the sad clown in He Who Gets Slapped, Chaney proved the possibilities of escaping oneself. As an artist might rush to his easel to sketch the characters he had encountered in a day, Chaney would go home to his makeup kit and superimpose upon his own flesh the faces he had studied in police courts, water front dives and cafés. With putty and plaster, collodion-created scars, false teeth, wigs, facial clamps, cotton stuffing and rubber dilaters, Actor Chaney would be somebody else...
...elder brother Edward IV. The camera peers at the proceedings past a huge head of glossy black hair. The head turns, and suddenly a long, coldly intellectual face stares straight at the spectator with an eye that catches him like a fishhook. This is Richard-lame leg, hunchback, "weerish withered arme" and all-and he is a frightening man indeed. A minute later the moviegoer is alone with the monster. "Why," he confides, as the thin lip writhes with an impish humor, "I can smile, and murder while I smile / . . . And wet my cheeks with artificial tears...