Wuthering Heights

“[Luis] Buñuel’s purest and, in spite of destructively indifferent acting, most successful exposition of l’amour fou. Wuthering Heights is the novel of a feverishly tortured imagination, and it can’t be done by having Cathy tripping about on a photogenically wild moor while Heathcliff glowers sullenly through knitted eyebrows. It needs a touch of the inferno, which is precisely what Buñuel gives it with his petrified landscape of baked earth and blackened trees; and his action gives the lie to Marvell’s famous couplet, ‘The grave’s a fine and private place/ But none I think do there embrace.’ . . . The smell of death literally hovers over the whole of the film. . . . L’amour fou in its uncompromising self-absorption—and it is cruelty which dominates this dead landscape: the butterflies pinned alive to Eduardo’s drawing board . . . the live toad thrown into a cauldron as an incantation. ‘Buñuel’s bestiary’ . . . lovingly underlined by billows of the deceptively tender Wagner on the soundtrack” (Tom Milne, Sight & Sound).