The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a 1939 American romantic drama film starring Charles Laughton and Maureen O'Hara.

Quasimodo, the deaf hunchback and bell ringer of Notre Dame Cathedral, is crowned the King of Fools until Frollo catches up to him and takes him back to the church.

Two years later, Universal regained interest in a remake, with a fan poll being instrumental in influencing the studio to make the film.

[6] For this production, RKO Radio Pictures built on their movie ranch a massive medieval city of Paris and Notre Dame Cathedral in the San Fernando Valley.

[7] After hearing the news that RKO was going to remake the 1923 film, Lon Chaney Jr. sought to play the role of Quasimodo and screen-tested for the studio.

While the studio felt that Chaney gave excellent performances in his numerous screen tests, other actors would be more suitable for the part, Orson Welles being one of the many considered.

Laughton was set to star as Quasimodo, but RKO offered Chaney the role when it seemed that the British actor would be unable to work in America due to troubles with the IRS.

[8] Pleased with her work on Alfred Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn, Laughton brought a then 18-year old Maureen O'Hara to Hollywood to play Esmeralda.

Walter Plunkett oversaw the costume design and Joseph H. August served as cinematographer, this film being the first of his three collaborations with Dieterle.

Filming proved to be difficult for the cast and crew due to the hot temperatures, particularly for Laughton, who had to act with a lot of makeup.

Feeling in pain because his native Britain had declared war on Germany, Laughton rang the bells over and over again until he fell down from exhaustion, overwhelming the crew with emotion.

Such changes were made because the filmmakers were concerned that portraying the priest as a villain would violate the policy of the Hays Production Code.

His younger brother, Jehan, is a teenage, drunken student, as well as a juvenile delinquent, in the novel; in the film, he is the middle-aged villain who is also Paris' chief justice and a close advisor to King Louis XI.

[14] Variety called the film a "super thriller-chiller" but found that the elaborate sets tended to overwhelm the story, particularly in the first half.

The lines themselves (such modernisms as 'to buy protection'), along with a perfunctory plot arrangement, are among the weak features of the film, which otherwise is a vivid pictorial drama of fifteenth-century Paris.

Though he acknowledged it was "handsome enough of production and its cast is expert," he called it "almost unrelievedly brutal and without the saving grace of unreality which makes Frankenstein's horrors a little comic.