The hunchback of Notre Dame / Hugo, Victor

In fifteenth-century Paris, a disfigured man named Quasimodo, who was abandoned as an infant in the cathedral of Notre-Dame and now lives in its bell tower, must come to the aid of a beautiful gypsy girl named Esmeralda after she repels the advances of the cruel archdeacon Don Claude Frollo.

A sumptuous dramatization of Victor Hugo's novel produced in 1923 by Universal Studios at the then phenomenal cost of $1.25 million. An extraordinary gamble, the film boldly deviated from established Hollywood formula and made its central character not a romantic ideal but a gruesomely disfigured "monster" incapable of arousing the beautiful leading lady to anything more than pity. As Quasimoto, Lon Chaney is a marvel of makeup and nonverbal expression, shuffling through the streets of medieval Paris, communing with the cathedral gargoyles, dutifully suffering the lash and humiliation for a crime committed against another, expressing a heart-rending love for a beautiful gypsy girl who naively sees only the military officer as the heroic ideal.

Relates the tragic life of the deformed Quasimodo and his hopeless love for the gypsy dancer Esmerelda.