Les Hauts de Hurlevent

Several people have mentioned the music from this film, and for good reason. This was one of a handful of extraordinary scores by the largely forgotten Michel Legrand (THREE MUSKATEER 1974; SUMMER OF '42, BRIAN'S SONG, among others), and is one of my favorite twenty or so film scores ever. This movie, well-photographed as it was, simply reeks of Gothic atmosphere in great part because of this music. Passionate, sensual, beautiful, and tremendously dramatic, it was even released as a record album in 1970 by the short-lived American International Records Label and, unfortunately, has never been made available on CD. It would be worth a purchase on eBay! I also feel that, while Dalton as Heathcliff is by no means in the same acting league as Sir Laurence Olivier, his passion for Calder-Marshall (who is less effective as Cathy than was Merle Oberon) is nonetheless more urgent and less studied than Oliver's was in the '39 version.

I enjoy the original film for its moody black and white imagery and its fine romantic score (by Alfred Newman, also not available on CD); but, though it's admittedly a lesser film, by a small margin I prefer this 1970 take which, without Legrand's evocative scoring, would probably have been a bust.

This version of Wuthering Heights, starring Timothy Dalton and Anna Calder-Marshall, is the only one I truly feel has realized Bronte's work, no transformed it! into screen. The music, although I haven't heard it since 1970, when the film was released, haunts me today. It's melancholy flute solo underscores a savage, brilliant performance by Timothy Dalton, and I cannot understand why this version is not available on video. Bravo! Timothy Dalton. You are Heathcliff, and this is one of my all-time favorite films. Certainly the one I most miss being able to view.

This version of Wuthering Heights was pretty much dismissed by the major reviewers back in 1970. Many of those reviewers couldn't get past the American International logo before ridiculing the movie as second rate teen angst. It has been treated more kindly in later years (three stars in Maltin's guide), but the film falls short in several areas. It's true that AIP spent more money on this than they normally did. Even the Corman Poe movies had a lower budget than WH. They hired a few middle level "name actors," primarily Harry Andrews and Pamela Brown (who is in only two scenes). Robert Fuest was not exactly a name director (before or after this) but he had delivered a big hit for AIP in "The Abominable Dr. Phibes." So, this was probably his reward.

I agree that the photography was the film's best asset, and the late John Coquillion, who shot it, went on to a fairly distinguished career, including shooting three Peckinpah films. The decision to film "on location" was also good, and the moors look appropriately bleak.

The major problem for me was not that the movie ends (as the 1939 version did) halfway through the novel, but that the transitions are abrupt and jarring. Now I have only seen it on vhs--the original EMI- HBO tape, not one of the later cheap versions--but I think It was uncut. There is, for instance, an unexplained gap from Cathy's decision to marry Edgar. Suddenly she married him, and his parents are both dead. There was a lame attempt to explain this in a scene of Edgar and Cathy in the graveyard. The sequence of Heathcliff seducing Edgar's sister is trite, as is the "shampoo commercial" ambiance of the love scene between Heathcliff and Cathy.

On the plus side Andrews and Julian Glover (as the adult Hindley) give good performances. I get the feeling that if AIP had been willing to spend a bit more, and maybe rework the script a bit for pace, this could have been a very good film. But as Sam Arkoff was once quoted in an Esquire magazine article about the AIP Beach Party movies, "Sometimes we get some director over here from the majors, and he says 'Sam if I could just have two more days, I could make you a good picture.' The hell with that," Arkoff continued. "We're not 'artsy-fartsy' at AIP!"

This particular rendition of Wuthering Heights is truthfully not as faithful to the novel as it could have been. Yet, I believe that this film expresses the bleary tone of the novel with the most stylistic level of credit. I think that any time a novel is translated into film it loses a certain amount of credibility due to the fact that the mediums of film and literature are interpreted by an audience in very different ways. But having read the novel, I prefer this version to any other that I've seen on film. Heathcliff and Cathy are cast astounding well in the film. Dalton is brooding and flawed without compromising his dark good looks while Calder-Marshall is waifishly emblematic of the heroine of the novel. I only wish that the film had delved more into the novel instead of offering merely of survey of it.

This is a classic example of a film made with the best of intentions, where most of the people involved didn't quite have a handle on the material and wound up producing something fairly inoffensive but forgettable... EXCEPT... somehow there are shining moments.

I've seen a lot of movies and it is pretty hard to impress me; but the sequence near the end of the film where Heathcliff goes down to Cathy's grave, later to be led on up the hill by her ghost, is simply one of the most haunting fleeting moments of cinema I have ever seen. In ANY film (and I have seen very many of the greats). Yes, this was just a lowly little teen-oriented American International Picture, directed by some studio stalwart, starring some inexperienced actors who were given a not very challenging screenplay that wasn't all that true to the source material. But this brief sequence just rises above all that -- simply and brilliantly directed, unforgettably scored (by Michel Legrand), fearlessly acted by a very young Timothy Dalton.

I don't know if I can recommend the movie based just on that, flawed as the film is, but I couldn't stop thinking about that scene for days, how close it got to the human condition on a visceral yet poetic level. It's just one of those things about moments of movie magic. You never know where it will strike, even in movies that don't rank with the best. I can't say I thought this version of Wuthering Heights was the best, but I can certainly understand why many people have remembered it fondly.