Wuthering Heights

As I write this nine people have given this 1920 British silent version of "Wuthering Heights" an average rating of 8.5! That's pretty good for a film that does not seem to exist any longer. I can only assume that they are rating one of the many other versions of this film made during the sound era. Having a great love and respect for what filmmakers were able to create in the so called silent era of film-making, it would be fascinating to see how "Wuthering Heights" handled. If the British had the talent that the Swedish Victor Seastrom show with his realistic acting and directing of the 1920 "The Phantom Carriage", then the film would be well worth finding. I doubt that the English filmmakers were turning out films to match Seastrom's masterpiece, but then neither were the American filmmakers doing so. Let's hope that someday this missing film will resurface.

Wuthering Heights has many good or tolerable adaptations, but there is no definitive version. Many of them skip over the second generation plot, choosing to focus solely on the doomed love affair between Heathcliff and Catherine.

This makes it all the more regrettable that this first film adaptation of the novel is lost, since from what we know of it, it covered the whole story. Rather than being advertised as a great love story, as the glossy 1939 version was, the taglines pronounced it as "Emily Bronte's tremendous story of hate." A shame that this version has not come to light in the years since and that we know so little. Hopefully it will turn up in an archive or closet somewhere.