(out of 5) "TNT hits paydirt with Mandy Patinkin's excellent portrayal of Victor Hugo's Quasimodo. Patinkin's makeup and mannerisms hearken back to Charles Laughton's in the same role, allowing the character's pain to be fully revealed. Richard Harris is pathological as the sadistic priest, and Salma Hayek is luminescent as the beautiful gypsy who befriends Quasimodo. This is not made for children; there is no sugarcoating for the torture and abuse the hunchback endures."--Video Movie Guide Not rated DIR: Peter Medak. CAST: Mandy Patinkin, Richard Harris, Salma Hayek. 1997 "'The Hunchback' director Peter Medak...defines the actor who portrays Quasimodo as a whirling dervish of enthusiasm. 'What Mandy has is this incredible energy, concentration and commitment. There is a relentlessness about it. You only get it with great serious actors.' ...Patinkin did, in fact, fashion a Quasimodo that is his own. 'He doesn't just sing songs, he embodies them,' the New Yorker wrote of Patinkin. The same may be said of his acting. He incarnates the epic agony of the bell-ringer, invoking epic compassion in the process. The actor took to this part as a bird does to flight. ...To find Quasimodo's raw emotional pain, Patinkin drew on memories of his father and an incident with his son Issac. 'One of the thoughts that went through my mind was of my oldest son's feeling of injustice when I disciplined him in a way that he felt unfair. His pain and rage of not being treated fairly was enslaved in my bones.''' --Los Angeles Times Syndicate "I was looking at the Laughton film. I looked at it every day. It was really our bible. I didn't think anyone could do it better. I hoped to drink its essence and hoped that somehow it came out in our sweat."--Mandy Patinkin, Scripps Howard News Service, 1997 "``The Hunchback'' director Peter Medak found no need to perform such miracles with Mandy Patinkin (``Chicago Hope''). Indeed, he defines the actor who portrays Quasimodo as a whirling dervish of enthusiasm. ``What Mandy has is this incredible energy, concentration and commitment. There is a relentlessness about it. You only get it with great serious actors.'' --"Look Out Laughton: Patinkin takes on Quasimodo", zap2it.com "TNT's "Hunchback" is the first I've heard of where the leading man is, in real life, almost as good-looking as his Esmeralda, played this time by yummy flavor-of-the-month Salma Hayek ("Fools Rush In," "Fled"). Add a thatch of straw-colored hair to the frightening face and awkward body, and a channel-surfer would have no idea that this Quasimodo is the heartthrob of "The Princess Bride" and "Yentl." At first, the casting seems like a stunt; is the famously angst-ridden Patinkin trying to atone for his hunkiness by taking on literature's ugliest hero? In the second half of "Hunchback," though, he finally gets to go beyond limping and drooling to flex his dramatic muscles, and he's immensely moving."--Milwaukee Journal Sentinel " ``For the hump I spent eight hours a day in make-up over five days,'' Patinkin said. ``But there's really very little make-up on my face except down over my eye and ear because I didn't want to be buried by the make-up. So I distorted my own face physically. And the other distortion was my body. ``Still for me this was just a heavenly role because I have such feelings and memories in my bones about Laughton's version. For my 40th birthday my wife gave me all of Laughton's films on video. It's the right kind of food, like America's classical music, the music I sing. I didn't grow up with that music but I like revisiting it because it's like a transfusion. ``Personally I feel Laughton wrote `The Hunchback,' not Hugo. Laughton brought Quasimodo to the human heart level. As long as I `sing' the notes that Laughton wrote I don't have to worry. Of course, I don't sing like Laughton and the atmosphere of this film is different and we have a different conductor (director Medak). So I don't have to worry. I can just drink Laughton in as much as I can.''" --The News-Times " Patinkin's Quasimodo is Howard Stern, the freak who gets even without getting the chicks; Richard Harris' Dom Frollo is O.J. Simpson, trying to suppress the press while twisting with murderous rage over an unrequited love; and Salma Hayek's Esmerelda is Pamela Lee, the babe who can't act. Done up with more makeup than Joan Rivers at spring break, Patinkin gives less a performance than a reinterpretation of Laughton's tour-de-force: He doesn't make you weep because he's playing Quasimodo channeling Laughton - he's theatrically heroic, something to see. Though much of what he says is unintelligible, Patinkin, a singer, scores when he laughs or cries, which is the same sound: A high-pitched wail to God for not having made him a statue."--Detroit News " If you didn't know "Chicago Hope"'s Mandy Patinkin is playing the lead, you'd have trouble recognizing him. Shuffling with a splay-legged gait in the footsteps of Lon Chaney and Charles Laughton, he's made up so the right side of his face is grotesquely off-center, as if smashed. For two-thirds of the film he gapes and scarcely utters a complete sentence: Most of his lines are "Sanctuary!" or "Molten lead! Molten lead! "Only after Quasi brings Esmeralda back to his belfry does he get full lines of dialogue, which he delivers with his bad side shyly hidden. In these scenes Patinkin plays Quasimodo with a pleasant, literate softness, speaking lovingly of books and the tintinnabulation of his bells." --Creative Loafing "Patinkin, his pallor heightened by the black T-shirt and shapeless black pants, is recovering from his gymnastic role as the crippled Quasimodo in The Hunchback, premiering Sunday night at 8 on TNT. Though he worked with a trainer, Patinkin's crouching gait and misshapen hump required him to use muscles in his legs and back he'd never met before. He also submitted to hours of grueling makeup that transformed the right side of his face into a grotesque grimace, his body into a leaden lump. If his Quasimodo looks familiar, it's because Patinkin patterned him after Charles Laughton's in the 1939 movie, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. "I was looking at the Laughton film. I looked at it every day. It was really our bible. I didn't think anyone could do it better. I hoped to drink its essence and hoped that somehow it came out in our sweat." --Detroit News TNT's Hunchback Website "Mandy Patinkin makes transition from 'Hope' to 'Hunchback'", The Standard Times "Hunk performs handsomely as literature's ugliest hero", Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Online "Still full of 'Hope,' Patinkin insists on doing things his way", Scripps Howard News Service "TNT's 'Hunchback' Changed to Suit the Cable Audience", Los Angeles Times "Hunchback Patinkin shuns makeup'", March 15, 1997 "The Hunchback rings off key", Tornoto Sun, March 14, 1997   Click here for photos