Emily Bront¸s novel, said her sister Charlotte, was "hewn in a wild workshop." Wyler's film was hewn in the hills of Ventura, Ca., with imported hot-house heather, but that's the magic of cinema: shot by Gregg Toland, Wuthering Heights depicts the seasonal changes on the wild moor passionately. The story is frightfully romantic, its Gothic intensity preserved by Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff, less so by Merle Oberon as a too-demure Cathy. The film was "a triumph of romantic willfulness over petty realities (Andrew Sarris)-realities like the entire second half of the novel, which was dispensed with to make this very literate screenplay work. Luis Bu-uel had wanted to film Wuthering Heights-"a novel that the Surrealists discovered and claimed for their own"-as early as 1932. "No producer would hear of it," he said. His 1954 version, filmed in Mexico, screens Monday, December 17.