Situated in Wyler's career between two of his Bette Davis films for Warners, Jezebel and The Letter (see February 23), Wuthering Heights is called by Gary Carey in Film Comment the film in which “in all probability Wyler really began to feel his oats as a ‘creative' director,” working for Samuel Goldwyn, with whom he had his most productive collaboration. Wuthering Heights is one of the most successful efforts at adapting a classic novel - and a distinguished stage actor, in the person of Laurence Olivier, brilliant in the role of Heathcliff - to the screen. The difficulties presented by the novel (hitherto considered completely unsuitable for filming) were evidently a challenge to Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, who dispensed with the second half of Emily Bronte's story and killed off Heathcliff in a snowstorm before his time, so to speak, at the film's end, not to destroy but to preserve the novel's gothic spirit. (By way of confirmation: the Variety review claimed Wuthering Heights “violates all the accepted rules of successful film stories. Its leading characters are something less than sympathetic - they are psychopathic exhibits. And the ending is stark, dire, tragic, an uncompromising finale....”) Similarly, Wyler and cinematographer Gregg Toland, rather than attempt to duplicate the haunting, fogged-in settings of Bronte's England, created a closed-in world, unique unto itself in effect, with an unsettling emphasis on the actor who is examined from deep focus, reverse angle, and full-on close-up in a fragmented setting ominously lacking in background. When it came out in 1939, Wuthering Heights was a successful, multi-handkerchief affair. Today, it is valued more for its unique photographic interpretation, as well as for remarkable performances by Olivier, David Niven, Donald Crisp and Merle Oberon. (JB)
•