The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1923
Lon Chaney stars in this $1,250,000 production - a considerable amount in those days. He played the part marvelously, and the movie was one of the year's most successful. Shooting began in December of 1922, and was completed in June of 1923. The centerpiece of the production was an elaborate recreation of the lower half of the Notre Dame cathedral and some of the surrounding streets, built on a San Fernando Valley backlot. The towers and upper part of the cathedral were done by a hanging miniature. Hundreds of people were engaged for the crowd scenes.
It took four hours of make-up to transform Chaney into Quasimodo and he had to carry a fifty-pound rubber cast to achieve his grotesque hunchback.
There are apparently no surviving 35 mm prints of the film. It exists only because Universal released it as a 16 mm Show-at-Home Library print in the 1920s, and all extant prints derive from these 16 mm prints which are missing approximately 15-20 minutes of footage.
Released
1923
Universal/Super Jewel
Director
Wallace Worsley
Screenplay
Edward T Lowe
Cast
Lon Chaney
(Quasimodo)
Patsy Ruth Miller
(Esmeralda)
Norman Kerry
(Phoebus)
Nigel de Brulier
(Dom Claude)
Ernest Torrence
(Clopin)