NFR Project: 'Wuthering Heights' (1939)

 

NFR Project: ‘Wuthering Heights’

Dir: William Wyler

Scr: Charles MacArthur, Ben Hecht, John Huston

Pho: Gregg Toland

Ed: Daniel Mandell

Premiere: March 24, 1939

103 min.

The moody, romantic 1847 novel by Charlotte Bronte serves as the source for this 1939 adaptation. It’s the story of star-crossed lovers, and the cruelties the hopeless inflict on themselves and each other.

Screenwriters Hecht and MacArthur adapt only the first half of the novel, concentrating on the doomed romance of Cathy Earnshaw and Heathcliff, her adopted brother. Set in the wilds of Yorkshire, it opens with a traveler seeking shelter from a blizzard at Wuthering Heights, where he is received by the dark and forbidding Heathcliff (Laurence Olivier). In the night, the visitor hears aa woman crying out for Heathcliff. An impassioned Heathcliff dashes out into the storm.

The traveler asks for details from the house’s servant Ellen. Her story outlines the growing to adulthood of Cathy (Merle Oberon) and Hindley Earnshaw, who are joined at their manor of Wuthering Heights by Heathcliff, a poor beggar boy their father has taken off the streets and brought home to raise as his own.

Hindley resents Heathcliff, and when their father dies unexpectedly, he treats him like a servant. Heathcliff grows up moody, brusque, and surly, but there is a deep attachment between him and Cathy.

When they’re grown, Heathcliff and Carthy climb the wall of their neighbor the Linton’s estate, and eagerly peer in at the ball taking place there. The family’s dogs attack Cathy, wounding her severely. She is taken in by the Lintons and immediately takes to their refined ways. Edgar Linton (David Niven) falls in love with Cathy and proposes. Cathy returns to Wuthering Heights and reports the news. Heathcliff, hearing this, runs away – before he can overhear Cathy declaring her undying love for and identification with him (“I am Heathcliff,” she memorably states.)

Years later, the Lintons are a married couple. Heathcliff returns from America a rich and somewhat more cultured man, and buys up Wuthering Heights and pays for Hindley’s excessive drinking and gambling, turning him into a hopeless pawn. He scorns a regretful Cathy, and marries Edgar’s sister Isabella, rapidly making her life miserable.

Cathy becomes ill, and Heathcliff barges into her house, taking her in his arms and holding her as she dies. He pleads with her to haunt him for the rest of his life. The story returns to the present, and Heathcliff is found dead on the moors. In a complete departure from the book, the spirits of Cathy and Heathcliff are united again.

The story is dark and gloomy, and Gregg Toland’s cinematography really captures the spirit of the piece. Wyler focuses a kind of restrained frenzy into the faces of the leading players, who are all resolutely miserable.

Who is the hero of the story? Cathy dies because she can’t reconcile her love for Heathcliff with the realities of her situation. Heathcliff goomily hangs on to his obsession with Cathy until death takes him as well. It’s a somber piece, quite in keeping with the spirit of the original. There are few Golden Age Hollywood adaptations better than this.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Young Mr. Lincoln.