The criteria for The Turner Classic Movies Essential list aren't easy to make. For one, they prefer older movies, so anything new won't make the list for thirty to fifty years. Secondly, the movie has to display talent in art, acting, and moral. The Hunchedback of Notre Dame from 1939 was today's essential movie on TCM. This movie can be taken as a tragedy, a story in which a flaw causes the main character to suffer, or even die, but it is up to you to decide who is the tragic hero.
The movie features Charles Laughton as Quasi Motto, A disfigured man the confined himself to the church bell towers, afraid of ridicule. The towns folk in the small French city only thought him possessed. The Story really starts when Esmeralda, the very young gypsy girl played by Maureen O'Hara, sneaking into town limits despite gypsies been forbidden. We all remember Maureen O'Hara as Mary-Kate from The Quiet Man, a few days ago, but this was her first American film when she was in her teens, and even then a stunning beauty.
The story revolves around how everyone admires Esmeralda's beauty, and pursues her, half thinking she's a whore, when really she's very innocent and simply trying to live in one place without being chased away. She is Fascinated with the ideas of religion, thinking that the people in the church will help her people, who have really done nothing wrong, just traveling as a nomadic people just after the middle ages.
The movie is really a film of intellect, stretching just over two hours, showing the cruelty of people for things they don't understand, telling the stories of both Quasi Motto and Esmeralda: She, Shunned for being a beautiful outsider, and he, profiled for being a disfigured insider. The artistic photography is beautiful and nearly unreal for the time.
The movie is rated PG, but rather long-plotted, a film for one into analyzing story and characters to find hidden truths, unlike the Disneyfied version in which everyone ends up happy. By the end of this adventure story, Some end up dead, only two leave happily, and one person is left to suffer until the day they die.
The movie is actually very serious and even a little depressing, but I found my mind looking at every action from both Quasi and Esmeralda to find characteristics that I never expected. A real Treat to watch, and defiantly worthy of the essentials list.
This is the Chick Of Flick, Signing off
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