General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20268 min read

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923 film)

The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a 1923 American silent drama-horror film directed by Wallace Worsley for Universal Pictures, starring Lon Chaney as Quasimodo, the deformed bell ringer of Notre Dame Cathedral who shelters the gypsy dancer Esmeralda, accused of witchcraft and murder in 15th-century Paris.¹ It was adapted from Victor Hugo's 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris.² At a cost of $1.25 million it was the most expensive film Universal had yet made, and its success made Chaney a screen legend.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Premiere and release	New York premiere at the Astor Theatre, 2 September 1923; general release 6 September 1923²
Source	Victor Hugo's novel Notre-Dame de Paris (Paris, 1831); scenario by Edward T. Lowe Jr., adaptation by Perley Poore Sheehan²
Principal cast	Lon Chaney (Quasimodo), Patsy Ruth Miller (Esmeralda), Norman Kerry (Phoebus), Ernest Torrence (Clopin), Tully Marshall (Louis XI)⁵
Cost	$1.25 million, the second most expensive Universal silent film, exceeded only by Uncle Tom's Cabin (1927) at $1.7 million³
Scale	Sets on nineteen acres of the Universal back lot, about 750 crew members, and more than 2,000 extras in the climactic sequence⁵
Original length	12 reels, 12,000 feet, 117 minutes per the AFI Catalog²
Survival	No 35mm print known; all extant copies derive from 16mm prints missing roughly 15 to 20 minutes of footage⁶

Spoilers

Story and adaptation

Screenwriter Edward T. Lowe Jr. made substantial changes to Hugo's novel, paring the story to a practical screen length, lightening the gloom that would not have been acceptable to theater audiences of the time, and removing Hugo's criticisms of the church.⁸ In the film, set in late 15th-century Paris, tensions between the harsh rule of King Louis XI and the impoverished masses led by the self-proclaimed King of the Beggars, Clopin, converge under Notre Dame; the Festival of Fools culminates in the crowning of Quasimodo as the city's ugliest man, and the archdeacon Don Claudio gives him shelter in the cathedral.² In the Rotten Tomatoes synopsis, the archdeacon's evil brother Jehan lusts after Esmeralda and orders Quasimodo to capture her; Captain Phoebus rescues her, and after Jehan frames her for the attempted murder of Phoebus, Quasimodo's loyalty is tested.¹⁰

Origins of the project

Chaney drove the project. Lon Chaney had been lobbying for a film version of Hugo's novel since 1920, but the picture went ahead only after he shared his ideas with Irving G. Thalberg, Universal's young head of production, who persuaded studio president Carl Laemmle to greenlight it.⁵ According to a modern Chaney biography cited by the AFI Catalog, Chaney in 1921 investigated purchasing the rights to the novel, which was not then copyrighted in the United States, and took a sixty-day option on them for $500; he discussed production with Universal and other studios, including a German company. In April 1922 Chelsea Picture Corp. announced a version starring Chaney to be directed by Alan Crosland, but by August 1922 Universal had renegotiated Chaney's contract and picked up the novel's rights. Chaney expected Frank Borzage to direct; Universal assigned Wallace Worsley instead.²

To lure Chaney back to the studio that had paid him $35 a week in his early years there, Thalberg offered a weekly salary of $2,500. Chaney, still resentful of his earlier treatment, insisted on $2,500 over and above his original salary, and Universal paid him $2,535 a week.³

Production

Shooting ran from December 1922 to June 1923, an unusually long schedule for the time and the longest of Chaney's career.³^•⁶ The centerpiece was a re-creation of the lower half of Notre Dame Cathedral, built from old blueprints and sketches made by Hugo himself, with the towers and upper structure suggested by a hanging miniature. The sets, which also included the Bastille and its drawbridge, a castle and gardens, and the Hôtel de Ville, covered nineteen acres and cost about $500,000.³^•⁷ Plans reported in December 1922 called for cathedral spires 265 feet high, avoiding the double-exposure process normally used to fake tall structures.²

The production used the first public address system on a movie set, the Western Electric Public Address Apparatus, which let Worsley give orders across the vast set. Ex-army officer George M. Stallings and ten assistant directors, headed by Jimmy Dugan and Jack Sullivan, controlled the mass of players; one of the junior assistants was William Wyler, a Laemmle relative from France.⁸ The night sequences took two months to film and, according to a later TCM account, still held the record for the largest number of electricians employed on one film.⁵

Chaney's Quasimodo

The makeup was Chaney's own work. He built Quasimodo from a cosmetic kit of cotton, makeup and grease pencils, moldable wax, modeling tools, colored powders, and a flask of collodion, a mixture of cotton powder, alcohol and ether that adheres to skin and forms scars and wrinkles. He applied cotton and collodion over his eyebrow ridges, deformed one eye, and wore a proto-latex hump.⁹ Sources differ on the hump's weight: the TCM article describes a twenty-pound plaster hump,⁵ the SUNY thesis a forty-pound proto-latex hump,⁹ and Chaney himself, in an interview quoted by the American Society of Cinematographers, described wearing a cast of about fifty pounds that was agony to carry.⁸

In the same interview Chaney said the makeup took him three hours and a half to apply, that he could not wear it longer than six hours at a time, and that he called the Hunchback the hardest part he ever played, because the character had to win the audience's sympathy despite his repulsive appearance. He said pulling off his false eyebrows had removed the hair from his own brows, that strong glue had burned his eyelid, and that he believed the hump had permanently warped his shoulders.⁸ He kept his makeup room closed to cast and crew during filming, retreating to it for repairs and touch-ups and emerging only when the result met his standards, according to an interview with his son Lon Chaney Jr.⁹ Although audiences assumed he did all his own stunts, Joe Bonomo doubled him in the scene in which Quasimodo slides down a rope in front of the cathedral to rescue Esmeralda from the King's guards.⁵

Reception and impact

The film premiered at New York's Astor Theatre on September 2, 1923, a week after a private screening at Carnegie Hall held as a benefit for veterans, and was an enormous hit that more than recouped Universal's costs.³ Critics were divided: Moving Picture World called it "a motion picture masterpiece that belongs among the ten best ever produced," while Variety's reviewer called it "a two-hour nightmare... murderous, hideous and repulsive."³ The New York Times critic called Chaney's performance "remarkable," and the September 1923 Variety review noted that although the billing sheets listed Chaney as the star, the onscreen credits of the print reviewed listed him as a featured player, while observing that his performance had earned him "starring honors."² A London review in November 1923 praised the settings, lighting, and Ernest Torrence's beggar king, but found Chaney's Quasimodo so convincingly repellent that the audience could not fully embrace the character.¹¹

The film's success confirmed Thalberg's reputation as a creative producer and helped set the standard for later historical epics.⁵ Along with Universal's The Phantom of the Opera (1925), it is the film with which Chaney is most associated.² In 1931 Universal considered a sound remake to reuse the durable sets, which Laemmle had insisted be built solidly; Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Henry Hull, Peter Lorre, and Edward G. Robinson were considered for Quasimodo, but Depression-era financing made the project impossible. RKO instead made the 1939 version starring Charles Laughton.³

Survival and restoration

The film apparently does not survive in 35mm. The film survives thanks to Universal's decision in the 1920s to issue it as a 16mm print in its Show-at-Home Library, and every surviving copy traces back to those 16mm versions, which lack roughly 15 to 20 minutes of footage.⁶ The film is in the public domain in the United States.¹² A restored 100-minute copy was screened at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival on May 10, 2022.² A 2007 French restoration from the only known original print runs 127 minutes, fifteen minutes longer than any other available version, with a symphonic score recorded in 2006 by Robert Israel.¹³ The Flicker Alley home-video edition is mastered from a multi-tinted 16mm print struck in 1926 from the original camera negative, with a score arranged by Donald Hunsberger and conducted by Israel.⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026