Les Hauts de Hurlevent

I fell in love with Timothy Dalton the first time I saw this film. Later I fell in love with the film. So much about it was so genuine. Most of all the unbridled passion between Heathcliff and Cathy. As depicted by Dalton and Marshall in this film the passion is so powerful the viewer can believe without doubt that it has the power to tear lovers to shreds. In other versions of Wuthering Heights, for me, it was always questionable. One of my favorite films.

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.

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 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.

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.