HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME BETAMAX CHARLES LAUGHTON BETA

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

RARE OUT OF PRINT BETAMAX

STUDIO RELEASE: KING OF VIDEO 2006

BOX IS MARKED VHS ON THE SIDE, WHICH WAS THE WAY THEY WERE PRINTED, AS THEY MADE VHS & BETA AT THE SAME TIME.  THEY THEN PLACED A BETA STICKER OVER VHS.  HERE YOU CAN SEE WHERE THE BETA STICKER FELL OFF. 

FILM RELEASE DATE: 1939

BETA RELEASE DATE: UNKNOWN

117 Minutes

NTSC Region 1

(USA, Canada, Japan, etc. See full list of countries using NTSC below.)

Of the many film versions of Victor Hugo's novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, this classic from Hollywood's greatest year of 1939 remains the best, rivaled only by the 1923 silent version starring Lon Chaney. In his triumphant attempt to create a performance as memorable as Chaney's, Charles Laughton played the lovelorn Parisian hunchback Quasimodo under a disfiguring costume and gruesome makeup that rendered the actor almost unrecognizable. The result is a gripping and heartfelt portrayal of the misshapen bell ringer who falls desperately in love with the beautiful gypsy Esmeralda (played by Maureen O'Hara). The lavish production also greatly benefits from exquisitely moody black-and-white cinematography, brilliant medieval set design, and the atmospheric direction by German expatriate William Dieterle, whose style was heavily influenced from the German films of his era.

BECAUSE THIS IS A BETA TAPE AND I CANNOT PLAY IT, AS I HAVE NO BETA PLAYER, IT IS SOLD AS-IS.  IT APPEARS IT SHOULD PLAY, BUT IT IS POSSIBLY 20-30 YEARS OLD.   I CONSIDER THESE TO BE MORE OF HISTORIC INTEREST, WITH SOMETIMES DIFFERENT ARTWORK, AS WELL AS FOR THEIR OBSCURITY, THAN AS SOMETHING TO SIMPLY VIEW.  ORIGINAL CLAMSHELL BOX WITH ORIGNAL ARTWORK IS IN VERY GOOD CONDITION. 

Sony's Betamax is the 1/2 inch (12.7 millimeter) home videocassette tape recording format introduced on April 16, 1975 (in market on May 10) and derived from the earlier, professional 3/4 inch (19.05 millimeter) U-matic video cassette format. Like the video home recording system VHS introduced by JVC in 1976, it had no guard band, and used azimuth recording to reduce cross-talk. The "Betamax" name came from a double meaning: beta being the Japanese word used to describe the way signals were recorded onto the tape, and from the fact that when the tape ran through the transport it looked like the Greek letter "Beta" (β). The suffix -max came from "maximum" to suggest greatness.  Sanyo marketed a version as Betacord, but this was also referred to casually as "Beta." In addition to Sony and Sanyo, Beta format video recorders were also sold by Toshiba, Pioneer, Aiwa and NEC, and the Zenith Electronics Corporation and WEGA Corporations contracted with Sony to produce VCRs for their product lines. Department stores like Sears, in the US and Canada, and Quelle in Germany sold Beta format VCRs under their house brands as did the RadioShack chain of electronic stores.  Betamax and VHS competed in a fierce format war which saw VHS come out on top in most markets. The VHS format's defeat of the Betamax format became a classic marketing case study. Sony's attempt to dictate an industry standard backfired when JVC made the tactical decision to forgo Sony's offer of Betamax in favor of developing their own technology. They felt that it would end up like the U-Matic deal, with Sony dominating.  By 1980, JVC's VHS format controlled 70% of the North American market. The large economy of scale allowed VHS units to be introduced to the European market at a far lower cost than the rarer Betamax units. In the UK, Betamax held a 25% market share in 1981, but by 1986 it was down to 7.5% and continued to decline further. By 1984, forty companies utilized the VHS format in comparison with Beta's twelve. Sony finally conceded defeat in 1988 when it too began producing VHS recorders.  In Japan, Betamax had more success and eventually evolved into Enhanced Definition Betamax with 500+ lines resolution, but eventually both Betamax and VHS were supplanted by laser-based technology. The last Sony Betamax was produced in 2002.

The following  countries  use  the NTSC system:

          United States, Canada, Mexico, Antigua, El Salvador, Philippines,Bahamas, Ecuador, Puerto Rico, Barbados, Guam, Saipan, Barbuda, Guatemala, Samoa, Belize, Haiti, South Korea, Bermuda, Honduras, Saint Kitts, Bolivia, Jamaica, Saint Lucia, Burma, Japan, Saint Vincent, Cambodia, Surinam, Midway Islands, Taiwan, Cayman Islands, Netherland Antilles, Tobago, Chile, Nicaragua, Trinidad, Colombia, North Mariana Island, Costa Rica, Panama, Venezuela, Cuba, Peru,Virgin Islands.                   

Charles Laughton was born on July 1, 1899, in Scarborough, Yorkshire, England. His mother was a devout Catholic and he attended the famed Jesuit school, Stonyhurst College, in Lancashire.  First he went into the family business of hotel operation, while participating in amateur theatricals in Scarborough. Finally allowed by his family to become a drama student at RADA in 1925, he would make his first professional stage appearance in 1926. Despite not having the looks for a romantic lead, he impressed audiences with his talent and played many classical roles before making his Hollywood film debut in 1932. Previously, he had appeared in a few British films. He took small roles in two short silent comedies starring his wife Elsa Lanchester, Daydreams and Blue Bottles (both 1928) and he made a brief appearance as a disgruntled diner in another silent film Piccadilly with Anna May Wong in 1929. He appeared with Elsa Lanchester again in a "film revue" called Comets (1930) and made two other early British talkies: Wolves with Dorothy Gish (1930) and Down River (1931).  His first Hollywood film was The Old Dark House (1932) with Boris Karloff but his best-remembered film role of that year was as Nero in Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross. That same year, he turned out a number of memorable performances, such as Dr. Moreau in Island of Lost Souls, and the little clerk in the segment of If I Had a Million directed by Ernst Lubitsch. In Hollywood, he also repeated his stage role as a murderer in Payment Deferred and played a demented submarine commander in The Devil and the Deep with Tallulah Bankhead, Gary Cooper and Cary Grant.  His work with film director Alexander Korda began in 1933 with The Private Life of Henry VIII (loosely based on the life of King Henry VIII of England), for which Laughton won an Academy Award, and the first British actor to do so. However, he continued to act in the theatre, and his American production of Galileo by (and with) Bertolt Brecht is legendary.  His later films included White Woman (1933) in which he co-starred with Carole Lombard as a cockney river trader in the Malaysian jungle; The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) as Norma Shearer's malevolent father; Les Misérables (1935) as Javert, the police inspector; Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) (as Captain Bligh, one of his most famous screen roles, co-starring with Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian); Ruggles of Red Gap (1935) as the very English butler transported to early 1900s America; and the title roles in Rembrandt (1936) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). In 1937, he was to have starred in an ill-fated film version of the classic novel, I, Claudius, by Robert Graves, which was abandoned only part-way into filming due to the injuries suffered by co-star Merle Oberon in a car crash.  After I, Claudius, he and the legendary German film producer Erich Pommer teamed up founding the company Mayflower Pictures in the UK, which produced three films starring Laughton: Vessel of Wrath (1938) , based on a story by W. Somerset Maugham, St. Martin's Lane, a story about London street entertainers, and Jamaica Inn, based on a novel by Daphne du Maurier, and the last film Alfred Hitchcock directed in Britain before moving to Hollywood in the late 1930s. (Note: Hitchcock returned to London to film Frenzy in the early 1970s.) The films produced were not successful enough, and the company was saved from bankruptcy when RKO Pictures offered Laughton the role of Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). Laughton and Pommer had plans to make further films, but the outbreak of World War II, which implied the loss of many foreign markets, meant the end of the company.  Laughton's film roles in the 1930s consisted almost entirely of the costume and historical drama parts for which he is best remembered (ie: Nero, Henry VIII, Captain Bligh, Rembrandt, Quasimodo, etc). In his modern-dress film roles in his 1940s movies his over-the-top acting style often led to variable results. He played an Italian vineyard owner in California in They Knew What They Wanted (1940); a South Seas patriarch in The Tuttles of Tahiti (1942); an impoverished pianist in Tales of Manhattan (1942); an American admiral in Stand by for Action (1942); a butler in Forever and a Day (1943); a cowardly school-master in occupied France in This Land is Mine (1943); an Australian bar-owner in The Man from Down Under (1943); the title role in an up-dated version of Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost (1944); and a wife-murderer in The Suspect (1944).  More successful however were the two comedies he made with Deanna Durbin, It Started with Eve (1941) and Because of Him (1946). He also seemed to enjoy himself both as a blood-thirsty pirate in Captain Kidd (1945) and as a malevolent judge in Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case (1948). Laughton was on top form again as a megalomaniac press tycoon in The Big Clock (1948). He had supporting roles as a Nazi in pre-war Paris in Arch of Triumph (1948); as a bishop in The Girl from Manhattan (1948); as a seedy go-between in The Bribe (1949); and a kindly widower in The Blue Veil (1951). (He played a bible-reading pastor in the multi-story A Miracle Can Happen (1947) but his sequence was deleted and replaced with another featuring Dorothy Lamour. In this form the film was re-titled On Our Merry Way).  Laughton made his first colour film in Paris as Inspector Maigret in The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949) and hammed it up enormously alongside Boris Karloff in The Strange Door (1951). He was a tramp in O. Henry's Full House (1952) in which he had a one-minute scene with Marilyn Monroe. He became a pirate again, buffoon-style this time, in Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952); he played Herod Antipas in Salome (1953) and repeated his role as Henry VIII in Young Bess (1953). He returned to England to star in Hobson's Choice (1954) under David Lean's direction.  Laughton received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for his role as Sir Wilfrid Robarts in the screen version of Agatha Christie's play Witness for the Prosecution (1957). He was the first actor to portray Agatha Christie's Belgian detective Hercule Poirot when he starred in Alibi - a stage adaptation of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - in 1928.  He played a British admiral in Under Ten Flags (1960) and worked for the first and only time with his chief acting rival, Laurence Olivier, in Spartacus (1960) as a wily Roman senator.  His final film was Advise and Consent (1962), for which he received favorable comments for his performance as a southern U.S. Senator (for which accent he studied recordings of the late Mississippi Senator John Stennis). Laughton worked on the film, which was directed by Otto Preminger, while he was dying from bone cancer.  Laughton took a stab at directing a movie, and the result was the legendary The Night of the Hunter (1955), starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish. This movie is often cited among today's critics as one of the best movies of the 1950s; unfortunately it was a critical and box-office flop when it was originally released. Laughton never had another chance to direct his own movies. He did not appear in the film, but worked solely as a director.  Charles Laughton made his London stage debut in Gogol's The Government Inspector (1926). He appeared in many West End plays over the next few years and his earliest successes on the stage were in roles like Hercule Poirot in Alibi and William Marble in Payment Deferred, in which he made his Broadway debut in 1931. He gave up the stage for a film career, but after the success of The Private Life of Henry VIII he appeared at the Old Vic Theatre in 1933 for a season of classic revivals. He appeared in roles like Macbeth, Lopakin in The Cherry Orchard, Prospero in The Tempest and had a major personal success as Angelo in Measure for Measure, but felt his appearance in the title role of Shakespeare's play Henry VIII was a mistake because audiences compared it with his Academy Award-winning film. At the end of 1936, Laughton played Captain Hook and Elsa Lanchester played Peter Pan in J. M. Barrie's play at the London Palladium.  Laughton worked closely with Bertolt Brecht on Brecht's play Galileo, which Laughton directed and played the title role at the play's English language premiere in Los Angeles in 1947 and later that year in New York.  Laughton had one of his most notable successes in the theatre by directing and playing the Devil in Don Juan in Hell beginning in 1950. The piece is actually the third act sequence from George Bernard Shaw's play Man and Superman, frequently cut from productions to reduce its playing time, consisting of a philosophical debate between Don Juan and the Devil with contributions from Doña Ana and the statue of Ana's father. Laughton conceived the piece as a staged reading and cast Charles Boyer, Cedric Hardwicke, and Agnes Moorehead (billed as "The First Drama Quartette") in the other roles. It was Boyer instead of Laughton who won a special Tony Award for the performance, possibly because Laughton was well-known for not caring about awards and never attended awards ceremonies when he was nominated for or won one, including the Oscars.He directed several plays on Broadway. His most notable box-office success as a director came in 1954, with The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, a full-length stage dramatization by Herman Wouk of the court-martial scene in Wouk's novel The Caine Mutiny. The play, starring Henry Fonda as defense attorney Barney Greenwald, opened the same year as the film starring Humphrey Bogart as Captain Queeg and Jose Ferrer as Greenwald based on the original novel, but did not affect that film's box-office performance. Laughton also directed a staged reading in 1953 of Stephen Vincent Benét's John Brown's Body, a full-length poem about the American Civil War and its aftermath. The production starred Tyrone Power, Raymond Massey (re-creating his film characterizations of Abraham Lincoln and John Brown (abolitionist)), and Judith Anderson. Laughton did not appear himself in either of these productions, but John Brown's Body was recorded complete by Columbia Masterworks.  Laughton returned to the London stage in 1958 in Jane Arden's The Party which also had Elsa Lanchester and Albert Finney in the cast. He made his final theatre appearances as Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Nights Dream and King Lear at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1959, although failing health resulted in both performances being disappointing, according to some British critics. The fact that he tried an unorthodox approach to the character of Lear, and was resented by some for having become an American citizen may have also something to do with the lukewarm critical reception, as well, although this is only speculation. His performance as King Lear came in for particular lambasting by critics, with many reviews saying that the portly actor looked more like Old King Cole than Shakespeare's creation, and critic Kenneth Tynan wrote that Laughton's Nick Bottom "...behaves in a manner that has nothing to do with acting, although it perfectly hits off the demeanor of a rapscallion uncle dressed up to entertain the children at a Christmas party". Unfortunately, although a British production of A Midsummer Night's Dream did air on television around this time, it was not the one with Laughton, but rather a 1958 production with Paul Rogers as Bottom.  Although he did not appear in any later plays, he continued to tour the US with staged readings, including a very successful appearance on the Stanford University campus in 1960.Laughton's unique and eloquent voice first appeared on 78 rpm records with the release of five British Regal Zonophone 10 inch discs entitled Voice of the Stars issued annually from 1934 to 1938. These featured short soundtrack snippets from the year's top films. He is heard on all five records in, respectively, The Private Life of Henry VIII, The Barratts of Wimpole Street, Mutiny on the Bounty, I, Claudius (curiously, since this film was unfinished and thus never released), and Vessel of Wrath. In 1937 he recorded Lincoln's Gettysburg Address on a 10 inch Columbia 78, having made such an impression with it in Ruggles of Red Gap.  He made several other spoken word recordings and one of his most famous was his one-man album of Charles Dickens's Mr. Pickwick's Christmas, a twenty-minute version of the Christmas chapter from Dickens's The Pickwick Papers. It was first released by Decca in 1944 as a four record 78 rpm set, but was afterwards transferred to LP. It frequently appeared on LP with a companion piece, Decca's 1941 adaptation of Dickens's A Christmas Carol, starring Ronald Colman as Scrooge. Both stories were released together on a Deutsche Grammophon CD in time for Christmas 2005. In 1943, Laughton recorded a reading of the Nativity story from St. Luke's Gospel, and this was released in 1995 on CD on a Nimbus Records collection entitled Prima Voce: The Spirit of Christmas Past.  A Brunswick/American Decca LP entitled Readings from the Bible featured Laughton reading Garden of Eden, The Fiery Furnace, Noah's Ark, and David and Goliath. It was released in 1958.  In an unusual move regarding a suspense thriller, Laughton was also heard narrating the story on the soundtrack album of the film that he directed, Night of the Hunter, accompanied by the film's score.  Also, and deriving from the movie they made together, a complete radio show (18 June 1945) of 'The Canterville Ghost' was broadcast which featured Laughton and Margaret O'Brien and later issued on LP. His wife Elsa Lanchester made three LPs in the 1950s entitled "Songs for a Shuttered Parlour," "Songs for a Smoke-Filled Room," and "Cockney London." Laughton introduced the various numbers with spoken introductions on the first two and wrote the sleeve notes for the third.  However, none of Laughton's other record albums have been made available on CD as yet. There are two especially notable ones still waiting. The first is a complete, two LP, Columbia Masterworks recording of the 1950 Broadway staging of George Bernard Shaw's Don Juan in Hell.  The other notable recording unavailable on CD is a two LP Capitol Records album that was released in 1962, the year of Laughton's death, entitled The Story Teller. Taken from the one-man stage shows that Laughton loved to appear in, it culls together dramatic readings from several sources. Three of the excerpts are broadcast annually on a Minnesota Public Radio Thanksgiving program entitled Giving Thanks. The Story Teller won a Grammy in 1962 for Best Spoken Word Recording.  He had a long and resilient marriage to actress Elsa Lanchester, although, in her autobiography, Lanchester revealed that Laughton was homosexual. According to her own account, she was shocked to learn about this, but eventually decided to remain married to him. However, she claims as a result of this, she decided not to have children with him. The decision caused him great grief, as he longed to become a father, as many friends of Laughton, among them Maureen O'Hara and Stanley Cortez, have stated. In her autobiographical book, Lanchester tells that one night, after they had been married for two years, the police stopped Laughton at the door of his London flat; they had a young boy in custody who had been loitering outside the house, presumably to get money after Laughton had approached him in Hyde Park. When her husband, in tears, confessed, Miss Lanchester told him not to worry about it, that it didn't matter. That's why he cried . . . when I told him it didn't matter.  Elsa Lanchester appeared opposite him in several films, including Rembrandt (1936) and Witness for the Prosecution (1957) for which both received Academy Award nominations. Laughton for Best Actor, and Lanchester for Best Supporting Actress. Neither won.  In 1950, the couple became American citizens.  Sadly Charles passed on December 15, 1962 after a long and illustrious career.  He is interred at Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles.