A truncated screen adaptation of Emily Bronté's magnum opus, William Wyler's WUTHERING HEIGHTS concentrates on the torrid, toxic, fire and brimstone of Cathy and Heathcliff's love tangle within an audience-friendly running time (103 minutes) and squarely omits all the latter-half chapters of the novel.
Introducing a frame story on a gelid, wind-blustering, snowy night with a spooky but tactfully off-screen phantom of Cathy, the film unspools 40 years back to recount the story from its jumping-off point when Cathy's father (Kellaway) brings back a recalcitrant urchin to Wuthering Heights and names him Heathcliff.
An infantile knight-in-shinning-armor fairytale only exclusively exists on the pair's old haunt, Peniston Crag (a recurring sanctuary they wish they could stay there for eternity, and they will), their puppy love evolves into a forbidden when they reach adulthood, but is there any future between a lady and a stable boy? Oscillating between her immanent passion to Heathcliff (Olivier) and an unfading yearning for living in silk-stocking comfort, Cathy (anexotic-looking Oberon) is the one who balks, only if Heathcliff were an exiled prince-in-disguise and could reclaim his fortune and stature, a toxin produced by a girlish flight of fancy, which will later turn into her daymare after she chooses to live the life of Riley by marrying her urbane suitor Edgar Linton (Niven, plays a thankless second fiddler).
Heathcliff, returns years later, with an elevated status expunging the class discrepancy and covertly obtains the property in Wuthering Heights from Cathy's bibulous, debt-ridden and unwitting brother Hindley (a fop-looking Williams), but we are denied an explanation of the provenance of his sudden wealth. So he is back to exact his revenge, after receiving a cold shoulder from Cathy, who is startled by his reappearance and transformation but decides to let bygones be bygones, the rub is that Cathy is contently married, there is no tectonic incentive for her to change the status quo, not even their undying love, this is the final blow to an expectant Heathcliff, because Cathy's love is the only beautiful thing Heathcliff has ever experienced.
Needless to say the outcome is internecine, but all players are game, Geraldine Fitzgerald owns her moment in her Oscar-nominated part as Isabella, Edgar's younger sister, poignantly shores up her transition from a pert maiden to a bitter, scorned wife after her epic failure trying to sow the seed of love in the most barren land of a man's heart. Equally Oscar-worthy is Flora Robson's loyal servant Ellen Dean, she is more than just the narrator, also the one who is present through the entirety of the melodrama and affectingly keeps her own counsel with sensibility in lieu of subservience.
Although the story goes that they are not on friendly terms during the production, the two leads are well-matched in eliciting a torrential spectacle of emotional outpourings, often in tandem with the silver-clad grandeur of the film's spectacular setting and cinematography. Laurence Olivier receives his first-ever Oscar invitation (who excels in haughtiness and callousness so well so that when the tenderness throbs, his voice has an otherworldly tenor actually works to the advantage of the character) but Merle Oberon is snubbed in a competitive year (she is most astonishing in “I am Heathcliff!” epiphany and the final deathbed recollections, no make-up applied), which could be a good thing, saving her from an awkward rout to Vivien Leigh in a banner year for GONE WITH THE WIND (1939) ,who has been vying to star side by side with her then lover Olivier but to no avail.
More than anything, William Wyler's film adaptation is a thoroughgoing specimen of how to grapple with the trying transposition from hallmark literature to celluloid screen, the knack is a time-honored maxim: you can't have your cake and eat it too, something must be given up, and all you need is an ace scissor-hand who knows how to winnow grist out of the sacrosanct urtexts.
referential points: Andrea Arnold's WUTHERING HEIGHTS (2011, 6.2/10), ANDRÉ TÉCHINÉ's THE BRONTE SISTERS (1979, 7.5/10)
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