5pm PST – Hunchback Of Notre Dame, The (1939) – A deformed bell ringer rescues a gypsy girl falsely accused of witchcraft and murder. Cast: Cedric Hardwicke , Charles Laughton , Thomas Mitchell , Edmond O’Brien Dir: William Dieterle BW-117 mins, TV-PG
Big Acting. Big Acting’s the worst, and we see a lot of big acting today. Here’s the rule: If you can see the acting, it’s big acting – and it’s bad acting. If you’re admiring the “technique,” there’s a problem. Film reviews that glow over accents and other actory affectations shouldn’t entice you into the theatre, they should be a red flag. You’re not supposed to notice that stuff. You’re supposed to be transported. Big Hollywood can give the otherwise talented Kate Winslet all the Golden Globes they want, but that wasn’t a character Winslet created in Revolutionary Road, it big acting and painful to sit through.
Big Characters, however, are one of the great joys of the Golden Age.
Charles Laughton’s performance as the hunchbacked Quasimodo takes us back to time when convincing larger-than-life portrayals could be seen regularly at the local cinema. Actors like Laughton, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Charlton Heston, Paul Muni… they all knew and understood that the secret to commanding the screen with a towering performance was to make the character larger-than-life, not the acting.
The film itself is a marvel of story, set design and photography. The end is MGM’d a bit, but novels and films are as different a form of art as painting and volleyball.
One quibble with this smart, poignant and literate production is the near heresy of filming Maureen O’Hara in black and white.
On the first day the movie gods created Technicolor.
On the second, Maureen O’Hara
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