The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Notre Dame de Paris) - A Victor Hugo Classic - Book - n - Movie Review

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Notre Dame de Paris) – A Victor Hugo Classic –Book - n - Movie Review    

The title has greatly influenced me from my teens and merited repetitive reading till date and  I have thoroughly enjoyed Victor Hugo Classics  “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and  “Les Miserables”. 

                      

                                                                                                                                                                    
As an established and successful Blog writer, it gives me immense joy to write about The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

I was greatly fascinated by Victor Hugo’s works.

The 1939 movie got a rating of 5/5 stars and the least 4.5/5 by international critics.  The Hunchback of Notre Dame is in the genre of historical romance.  

SYNOPSIS -

The Hunchback of Notre Dame is the story of Quasimodo a deformed hunchback,  a church bell ringer  - Notre Dame De Paris, a Cathedral in Paris – and Esmeralda a beautiful Gypsy girl and her stalker Claude Frollo (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) an influential person in the court of King Louis XI (Harry Devenport).  Esmeralda was attracted by Captain Phoebus (Alan Marshal) and he loved her.  Frollo employs Quasimido to take Esmeralda as captive.  Quasimodo has a liking for Esmeralda  and wants to help her.  Once Esmeralda was to rescue a poet Gringoire (Edmond O’Brien) from the gallows by readying to marry him.  Frollo lusted after Esmeralda stabs to death his arch rival Captain Phoebus and tries to implicate Esmeralda in the gruesome murder case to take advantage of her thus setting the stage for a gripping confrontation between Quasimodo and Frollo.  There are three other men trying to rescue Esmeralda from the murder charges in their own ways.  There is the poet Gringoire writing a pamphlet to the King pleading that Esmeralda is innocent and there is a head of beggars Clopin (Thomas Mitchell) who with  his battalion of beggars  storm the Cathedral in the end sequence to rescue Esmeralda and the King himself who feels pity on Esmeralda.  At the end of the story Quasimodo manages  to hurl Frollo from the top of the bell tower  to the bottom of it and saves Esmeralda from the wicked Frollo’s evil designs.  However, after seeing Esmeralda’s love for the poet Gringoire, Quasimodo loses his heart and wept why god made him a man instead of the bell tower stone which does not have any emotions.  A superlative sentimental performance by Charles Laughton as Quasimodo depicting self pity.

The screen adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel was made by Bruno Frank and the screen play was written by Sonya Levien.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the movie made in 1939 was an all time classic.  A superlative performance by Charles Laughton as the hunchback  and  competent performances by Maureen O’Hara as the beautiful Gypsy Girl and her fellow American Edmond  O’Brien who debuted in the film  as the poet Gringoire was also worth mentioning. The movie has excellent art direction (Van Nest Polglase) and cinematography (Joseph H.August).  However, the highlight being  a superlative performance by Charles Laughton as Quasimodo the hunchback.   The movie later on presented with computerized coloring.  The climax sequence was even better than what Victor Hugo himself would have imagined.

          

                    

The novel had many film adaptations over the years including the Anthony Quinn and the beautiful and sexy Gina Lollobrigida starrer  “Der Glockner von Notre Dame” (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) in Cinemascope.   There is also a  Richard Harris and Salma Hayek  starrer  with the same title “The Hunchback of Notre Dame".

                      

               

The Walt Disney productions has made an animated version and also a sequel to The hunchback of Notre Dame with Demi Moore.

In 1923 a silent movie was made based on the Novel  “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”.

The Hunhchback of Notre Dame was made in French titled as “Quasimodo” and in Italian as “Notre Dame”.

                                             

                                 

VICTOR   HUGO –

                                 

 

The Victor Hugo classics are available with Amazon.in.   You can procure a copy of the book or DVD of the movie by placing an online order.  The Hunchback of Notre Dame is also available in Graphic Classics.

A famous quote by Victor Hugo –

“To love beauty is to see light”.

Victor Hugo spent 15 years in self exile in Guernsey from 1855 and the island provided the inspiration for many of his fine works, including “Les Miserables” and “Toilers of the Sea”.

“There is nothing like a dream to create the future”  -   Victor Hugo.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame was one of the banned classic.  The Britishers did not permit their  children to read the book or watch the movie “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”.

                          









Victor  Hugo’s  contribution  to  literature  -

Victor Marie Hugo (February 26, 1802 - May 22, 1885) is a celebrated French Author, Poet and Playwright of the Romantic movement era.  He is considered one of the greatest and best known French writers of the 19^th Century.  His works touches upon most of the political and social issues and artistic trends of his time.

He was also a visual artist, statesman and human rights activist, though his fame primarily lies in his novels, poem and dramas.

Apart from his contributions to poetry, novels and dramas, he has also produced more than 4000 drawings, which have since been admired for their beauty and earned widespread respect as a campaigner for social causes such as abolition of death penalty. 

His drawings are surprisingly accomplished and "modern" in their style and execution, foreshadowing the experimental techniques of Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.

Victor Hugo was one of the greatest elegiac and lyric poets of his time.

After training as a lawyer, Hugo embarked on the literary career.   Hugo's innovative brand of Romanticism was developed over the first decade of his career.

The precocious passion and eloquence of Hugo's early work brought success and fame at an early age. His first collection of poetry (Odes et poésies diverses) was published in 1822, when Hugo was only twenty years old, and earned him a royal pension from King Louis XVIII. Though the poems were admired for their spontaneous fervor and fluency, it was the collection that followed four years later in 1826 (Odes et Ballades) that revealed Hugo to be a great poet, a natural master of lyric and creative song.

Literature lovers can walk in the footsteps of one of the most celebrated authors of the 19th century.  Victor Hugo’s works would have a profound influence on later writers such as Albert Camus, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
 

Hugo turned away from social and political issues in his next novel, Les Travailleurs de la Mer (Toilers of the Sea), published in 1866. The book was well received, perhaps due to the previous success of Les Misérables.  Dedicated to the channel island of Guernsey where he spent 15 years of self exile, Hugo tells of a man who attempts to win the approval of his beloved's father by rescuing his ship, intentionally marooned by its captain who hopes to escape with a treasure of money it is transporting, through an exhausting battle of human engineering against the force of the sea and a battle against an almost mythical beast of the sea, a giant squid. Superficially an adventure, one of Hugo's biographers calls it a "metaphor for the nineteenth century–technical progress, creative genius and hard work overcoming the immanent evil of the material world.

The fusion of the contemporary with the apocalyptic was always a particular mark of Hugo’s genius.

A brief  biography -

“Life is the flower for which love is the honey”    -   Victor Hugo.

Hugo was the third son of Joseph Leopold Sigisbert Hugo and Sophie Tribuchet.

Since Hugo's father was a high ranked officer, a General in the Napolean’s Army, the family moved frequently and Hugo learned much from these travels. On a childhood family trip to Naples, Hugo saw the vast Alpine passes and the snowy peaks, the magnificently blue Mediterranean, and Rome during its festivities.  Though he was only five years old at the time, he remembered the six-month-long trip vividly. They stayed in Naples for a few months and then headed back to Paris
.

Young Victor fell in love and, against his mother's wishes, became secretly engaged to his childhood friend Adèle Foucher (1803–1868).   Because of his close relationship with his mother, Hugo waited until after his mother's death (in 1821) to marry Adèle in 1822.

Adèle and Victor Hugo had their first child, Léopold, in 1823, but the boy died in infancy. The following year, on 28 August 1824, the couple's second child, Léopoldine was born, followed by Charles on 4 November 1826, François-Victor on 28 October 1828, and Adèle  on 24 August 1830.

Hugo's oldest and favorite daughter, Léopoldine, died at age 19 in 1843, shortly after her marriage to Charles Vacquerie.  On 4 September 1843, she drowned in the Seine at Villequier, pulled down by her heavy skirts, when a boat overturned. Her young husband also died trying to save her. The death left her father devastated; Hugo was traveling with his mistress at the time in the south of France, and first learned about Léopoldine's death from a newspaper he read in a cafe.

He describes his shock and grief in his famous poem À Villequier -

Alas! turning an envious eye towards the past,

inconsolable by anything on earth,

I keep looking at that moment of my life

when I saw her open her wings and fly away!

I will see that instant until I die,

that instant—too much for tears!

when I cried out: "The child that I had just now--

what! I don't have her any more!"

He wrote many poems afterwards about his daughter's life and death, and at least one biographer claims he never completely recovered from it. His most famous poem is probably Demain, dès l'aube, in which he describes visiting her grave.

Hugo was on a self exile to Brussels, Luxomberg for 15 years and returned in 1870, where he was appointed to the National Assembly and the Senate. He was also a member of the Association Litteraire et Artistique International.

Hugo died in Paris on May 22, 1885 at the age of 83.   He was given a national funeral, attended by two million people, and buried in the Panthéon, France.

His legacy has been honored in many ways, including his portrait being placed on the French Currency  francs.  A number of streets and avenues throughout France are likewise named after him.

                                 










Today the novel remains his most enduringly popular work. It is popular worldwide, and has been adapted for cinema, television and stage shows.

There are 56 works published during his lifetime and 22 works published posthumously.  The length of the blog does not permit me to list out all his works by mentioning their names.

After the publication of his novel “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, the Cathedral Notre Dame has become a monumental building attracting a huge tourist population.

Hugo remains one of the giants of French literature. Although French audiences celebrate him primarily as a poet, he is better known as a novelist in English-speaking countries.

Anybody with a taste for literature will never forget Victor Hugo’s invaluable treasure of works.