Wuthering Heights

The 1970 version of Wuthering Heights is the best version of the novel on film. Restrained, realistic, it did not go "over the top" emotionally like the 1939 one. Timithy Dalton' s portrayal of Heathcliff is very passionate but is more of a real person instead of just a romantic idel. Samuel J. Arkoff died yesterday. He made a lot of low budget exploitation pictures in the fifties and sixties.

They were fun and not demeaning like the films of today. In 1970 he made this very serious film and was never really given the publicity or the credit he deserved.

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 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.

My mother had seen this movie in theaters as a girl and, since then, has always commented on how "romantic and secretly sexy" Timothy Dalton and the picture were. I recently saw the film for the first time and could not agree with her more. I was impelled to read the book afterwards and did so in 7.5 hours! I couldn't put it down! The movie was strikingly different from the book but was still wonderful. Dalton and Calder-Marshall shine in their roles. The camera-work is excellent but not even the glorious English moors can distract us from the love of Heathcliff and Cathy. While most likely a "chick flick," this movie is to be enjoyed by all.

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!"