#212: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Wallace Worsley, 1923)

Wallace Worsley is a name that has largely receded into history. The former Broadway star and silent film director's name never entered the pantheon of timeless greats, and he's largely unknown today. Granted, he's not as innovative or as formally interesting as his more celebrated peers like Murnau and Griffith, but based on the evidence of this film and 1920's The Penalty (also starring Lon Chaney and also reviewed on this site), he deserves more attention.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame is Worsley's most famous film, thanks in large part to the enduring popularity of the Victor Hugo source novel and the iconic title performance by Lon Chaney, but those aren't the film's only virtues. Worsley capably and confidently handles the tricky feat of wrangling a literary adaptation with several characters, hundreds of extras, and an event-filled plot without succumbing to bloat, unevenness, numbing of the viewer, or a draggy pace. The characters are fleshed out and distinct, nothing seems rushed, but the action really moves. The story is a melodrama/adventure hybrid with a Gothic horror feel and a central romance that drives the plot, and Worsley handles this mixture of genre and tone with skill and cohesion.

You're probably familiar with at least one version of this story. Worsley's film sticks closely to Hugo's novel. Chaney is Quasimodo, the deformed, disfigured bell ringer at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and the servant of Jehan (Brandon Hurst), the evil brother of the much nicer archdeacon Don Claudio (Nigel De Brulier). Jehan concocts a scheme to kidnap Gypsy dancer Esmeralda (Patsy Ruth Miller), adopted daughter of Clopin (Ernest Torrence), figurehead and leader of the oppressed beggars of Paris, and makes Quasimoto do his dirty work. Quasimoto is captured in the act, Jehan slinks away, and major events are set in motion. Meanwhile, Esmeralda is falling in love with aristocrat and town hunk Phoebus (Norman Kerry), which also sets several major events in motion. Norman Kerry's biography on imdb.com contains the following sentence: "He often wore fancy wax mustaches." You will be happy to know he wears a fancy wax mustache in this film. His Hollywood head shot also shows him wearing a fancy wax mustache.

The large cast, including several characters I didn't even mention, is uniformly excellent, particularly Chaney and Miller. Miller has a face that was destined to put her in the movies, and Chaney has a different face in every movie. Chaney's physicality and willingness to put himself in all kinds of painful appearance-altering devices for the sake of his character in is full evidence here. In addition to the large cast of characters, the film called for hundreds of extras. In this shitty era of clicking on a mouse to create crowds of people, it is especially enjoyable to see actual throngs of humanity playing fictional throngs of humanity. The producers picked up extras on the streets of downtown Los Angeles, paying them one dollar a day for their trouble. This method of acquiring extras meant that a large chunk of them were prostitutes and petty criminals. The prostitutes, by unconfirmed reports, made some extra money offering their services after shooting wrapped, and other extras got their pockets picked by the petty crooks. The producers eventually added fifty Pinkerton detectives to the cast of extras to cut down on the pocket-picking. Take that, CGI nerds. Ninety years from now, legendary Hollywood stories from our current year will be about people making things in an office on a computer and a few blandly attractive actors jumping around in front of a green screen. Fuck that shit.

This film, a passion project for star Chaney, who owned the rights, almost didn't happen, falling through on several occasions and moving from director to director (including Erich Von Stroheim and Tod Browning) until Worsley got the job. Universal, known at the time for cutting costs and making things on the cheap, decided to pour lots of time and money into this film and make it a signature prestige project. The lavish sets took six months to build, and that work is visible on the screen. This really looks like a 15th century Paris neighborhood (yeah, how would I know that etc., but I'm talking imaginatively and emotionally here), even though it's a Hollywood studio. The costumes took six weeks and are also very elaborate. All this time and money paid off, and the movie was a massive hit, becoming Universal's most profitable silent film. It earned $3 million at the box office, which was a massive pile of dough in 1923. Normally, I don't give a shit about box office receipts, but somehow I find silent film figures like that interesting. Why? I don't know.

Besides its superficial success, the movie is an artistic success, too. Worsley gets so many iconic images from his cast doing their thing on those gorgeous sets, and there's so much detailed activity and life in every frame. I dig this movie.

#211: Attack of the Beast Creatures (Michael Stanley, 1985)

Made in 1983, this extremely low budget Connecticut-filmed micro-indie doesn't have a whole lot going for it, besides its fantastically redundant title, but it powers through all its limitations and weaknesses with energy and pizzazz. This is not a good movie, or even a barely competent one, but I admire its plucky charm and just as plucky lack of charm. Somehow, these people made this movie and it exists, and that is something.

Set in 1920 for no real discernible reason other than to put some of the men in tuxedos and the women in old-fashioned evening gowns and flapper-wear, Attack of the Beast Creatures begins with a group of survivors on a lifeboat pulling some other survivors out of the water and trying and failing to rescue a few others. The surviving motley crew are American passengers and employees of a ship sailing for England. The ship sank somewhere in the North Atlantic, and our survivors are adrift on the ocean looking for any sign of help. They eventually make their way to a strange island where the plan is to take shelter for the night and find some food before making signal fires in the morning.

The freaky island has other plans. Despite its delicious berries and refreshing streams with fresh fish, the island also contains deceptively tranquil pools of water that are actually flesh-melting acid, as one poor sucker finds out to his face-melting chagrin. The acid pools are merely the preamble to the island's premier attraction: a population of tiny, flesh-eating terrors strongly resembling bright-red versions of the killer Zuni doll that tormented Karen Black in Trilogy of Terror. These little guys have strength in numbers, and love chomping down on our collection of shipwreck survivors.

And that's pretty much it. The rest of the movie is a series of attacks on the humans by the tiny doll monsters as our ever-decreasing crew attempts to make it back to their boat and get the eff out of Dodge.

Director Stanley and writer Robert A. Hutton make sure each character gets exactly one character trait, and they squabble, help each other, and yell and scream a lot as they fend off attack after attack by our Zuni-esque beast creatures. The acting is pretty bad across the board, though this is the only movie most of our cast and crew has ever made, so that's pretty understandable. The sound and lighting are also fairly poor, but our filmmakers give it all they've got, adding spooky electronic music to underscore the action and quick cutting and camera movements, POV shots, and goofy sounds to give the otherwise fairly static beast creatures a sense of menace and movement. I also enjoyed their glowing eyes in the dark while one of our characters stood watch at the campfire.

I don't know the origins of this film, but judging by the number of Huttons in the credits, I assume this was a largely family-financed and produced labor of love that accidentally stumbled into limited distribution. The 1980s VHS release is long out of print, and no official DVD exists. Don't hold your breath for a Criterion release. The best way to see Attack of the Beast Creatures now is YouTube. As of this writing two separate accounts have uploaded the whole thing. It's not a good movie, but it is a good time, and I couldn't help but smile through most of it.