Cons: Hammy performances, butchered screenplay, cheesy score, the list goes on...
The Bottom Line: The novel itself is lowbrow porn masqueraded as Victorian literature. This G-rated film adaptation does nothing to convey Brontë's vision.
When it comes to butchered adaptations of literary masterpieces, years from now, I’m bound to think of William Wyler’s 1939 film Wuthering Heights. Though this movie garnered eight Oscar nominations, including Best Screenplay for Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, it represents possibly the worst example of what can happen to beloved novels when they go through the Hollywood machine.
Emily Brontë must have been rolling over in her grave when this Samuel Goldwyn produced piece of work came out. And it’s not like at that time, 1939, Vincent Fleming didn’t make a 4-hour in length and in color film based on a classic novel named Gone in the Wind. Wuthering Heights has no excuse whatsoever for being as poor as it is.
Most are already aware that Wyler’s film concludes at approximately the end of Chapter 15. What some of them might not be wise to, is that in addition to that, a number of other liberties have been taken in bringing Brontë’s book to the big screen. But let’s stick to it ending at just about the halfway point of the book. At the beginning of Chapter 16, a slew of new characters, known as the second generation, are introduced. Here, they’re completely excised.
Hecht and MacArthur stripped Brontë’s epic love story down to its bare essential characters and plot. What was one of the most brilliantly nuanced and complex romance ever written in the English language has been changed in the film to nothing more than puppy love to the next level. It’s a cheesy romance with an unbearably, forcefully manipulative score by Alfred Newman.
There aren’t even plot developments in this movie; there are arbitrary to those who haven’t read the book contrivances. Heathcliff and Catherine don’t have a love for the ages either, 160 pages in the novel is unforgivably condensed into 103 minutes. The two don’t even seem like real people.
Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon’s hammy performances do nothing to deter from the fact that these characters are thinly written caricatures. If that’s how the leads how are depicted, what little semblances of humanity do you think the supporting players possess?
If one character in the novel could’ve been expurgated for the filmed adaptation, it could’ve been Lockwood. He’s the annoying narrator, made all the more irritating by Miles Mander the few minutes he is unnecessarily in this movie.
When critics talk about Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho they say its one flaw is the “psychiatric blather” (Roger Ebert) explaining Norman’s condition. When a shot-by-shot remake of the film was announced in 1998, there was nary a soul who didn’t balk at the mere idea. If there was one thing that director Gus Van Sant could’ve done to validate his decision to make the film, it would’ve been to correct Hitchcock’s one mistake.
If the creative team behind the movie Wuthering Heights were making a bowdlerization that would have Emily Brontë clawing at her coffin no matter what, the one thing they could’ve done to validate cutting the novel to hell was cut Lockwood out.
It’s not surprising that neither Van Sant nor Wyler did the one thing they could’ve done to improve upon their respective originals.
Wuthering Heights is one of those old Hollywood films that looks, sounds, feels, and totally and completely comes off as stilted. It betrays the intentions of the author to the point where I feel I need to file a lawsuit upon her behalf.
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