Sanctuary

There's a classic movie of The Hunchback of Notre Dame that came out in 1939, the year of all the great Hollywood movies (Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz). There's a scene where they're about to hang Gypsy girl Maureen O'Hara but hunchback Charles Laughton comes swinging on a rope, snatches her and carries her back to the cathedral, where he proclaims in his inarticulate voice, "Sanctuary!"  In the movie she gets a reprieve in the end; in the book I think she gets hanged. (I'm going to read it someday, along with all other books that got made into Classics Illustrated comics!)

I first saw that movie on the TVOntario weeknight series Magic Shadows, where they'd show a movie in parts from Monday to Thursday, then show a serial on Friday. (Some of the longer movies got shown on Friday as well.) I also saw the cut-rate King Kong spectacle Mighty Joe Young and the Marx Brothers movie A Night in Casablanca on that show.  And I saw a lot of classics on Yost's Saturday Night at the Movies, like King Kong and The Grapes of Wrath and Douglas Fairbanks' silent swashbuckler The Mark of Zorro.

Charles Laughton is one of my favourite '30s actors.  His Oscar-winning performance was in The Private Life of Henry VIII, of course. (I like the scene where they're gambling on cock fights and her wife loses all her money, so he gives her his winnings then takes out his purse and gives her even more money!) My favourite Laughton performance is in Rembrandt.  When I see a Rembrandt self-portrait I think of Laughton, just as reading a Stevie Smith poem makes me think of Glenda Jackson.  And he was a witty Javert in Les Miserables.  He was also going to play the title role in a movie of I, Claudius, but sadly the production got aborted.