The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Lon Chaney's astonishing physical performance as the bell-ringer of Notre Dame — hunchbacked, half-blind, and deaf from years among the bells — is reason enough to see this lavish Universal production, but the scale of the filmmaking matches his achievement. The studio constructed a near-full-size replica of the cathedral facade on its back lot, and the climactic sequences, with Chaney pouring molten lead on the mob below and swinging from the bells, are among the most thrilling in all of silent cinema. The story of the gypsy girl Esmeralda, falsely accused and pursued by the obsessed archdeacon Frollo, moves with a grandeur that anticipates the best of Hollywood's golden-age epics. Chaney's makeup — which he designed and applied himself, enduring hours of painful prosthetics — transforms him so completely that the tenderness he brings to Quasimodo becomes all the more remarkable.